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BL    51    .H3 

Hall,  Thomas  Cuming,  18b«-, 

1936.  I 

Religion  and  life 


BY  THE  SAME  AUTHOR 


Social  Solutions  in  the  Light  of  Christian  Ethics 

Crown  8vo.     Gold  top.     Net.  $1.50 

Historical  Setting  of  the  Early  Gospel 

12mo.     Gold  top.     Net,  75  cents 


RELIGION  AND  LIFE 


V 


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sjSTorregg 


NOV   6   1913 


BY         y       \> 
THOMAS  CUMING  HALL^^^gj^^j^  ^^^V* 


Profeosor  of  Christian  Ethics 
Union  Theological  Seminary,  New  York 


New  York:   EATON    &    MAINS 
Cincinnati :   JENNINGS  &  GRAHAM 


Copyright,  1913,  by 
THOMAS  CUMING  HALL 


IN  LOVING  MEMORY 

OF 

GEORGE  WILLIAM  KNOX,  D.D. 


DIED  IN 
SEOUL,  KOREA,  APRIL  25,  1912 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

I.  Our  General  Assumptions 1 

II.  Primitive  Religion 27 

III.  The  Twofold  Interest 39 

IV.  The  Prophetic  Interest 56 

V.  Creative  Idealism  and  Life 67 

VI.  Religion  and  Mastery  of  the  Material  World  83 

VII.  Religion  and  Society 94 

VIII.  Types  of  Religious  Development 108 

IX.  Ethics  and  Religion 127 

X.  Religion  and  the  State 140 


Vll 


ANALYSIS  OF  THE  ARGUMENT 

I 

Why  our  definition  of  religion  must  be  general — 
A  tentative  definition  of  religion — The  general  im- 
portance of  religion — ^The  forms  of  religion  either 
a  waste  or  a  benefit — ^The  evidences  that  it  is  still 
a  force — How  shall  we  know  whether  it  is  true 
or  not? — ^The  character  of  knowledge — Experience 
as  related  to  abstraction — Mathematics  and  knowl- 
edge— Knowledge  and  experiment — Knowledge  and 
history — Religion  and  the  personal  life — ^The  sci- 
entific method  for  the  examination  of  religion. 

II 

The  primitive  character  of  religion — Relation  of 
religion  to  mystery — The  study  of  so-called  prim- 
itive man — Religion  and  magic — Meaning  of  mdna 
and  taboo — ^Religion  as  the  whole  complex  of  prim- 
itive life — Its  unifying  power — The  dependence  of 
forms  upon  stage  of  culture — The  conserving  char- 
acter of  forms — ^The  cycle  of  the  seasons — Myths 
and  customs — The  rise  of  a  pantheon — ^The  veg- 
etative and  the  astronomical  cycles — The  marks 
of  a  religion  upon  the  round  of  Ufe — Its  traces  in 
houses  and  music. 

Ill 

The  priest  and  religion — ^The  two  types  of  re- 
ligious interest:  the  priestly  and  the  prophetic — 

ix 


X       ANALYSIS  OF  THE  ARGUMENT 

Priestly  interest  in  continuity — The  ancient  is  the 
sacred — The  priestly  interest  in  order  and  cult — 
The  rhythm  of  life  and  the  education  of  the  group 
under  priestly  control — ^The  risk  of  overfunctioning 
— The  basis  of  power  in  the  authority — Priestly 
reaction  and  its  reason — The  danger  to  its  ethics — 
Its  thirst  for  power — Its  services  and  degradation. 

IV 

The  origin  of  the  prophet — The  relation  of  the 
prophet  to  the  priest — The  lowly  origin — ^The  dis- 
ruptive character — ^The  false  prophets — The  dan- 
gers of  the  prophet — His  vision — His  relation  to 
organization — ^The  test  of  the  prophet — Why  we 
generally  reject  the  true  prophet. 

V 

The  determinist  controversy  and  its  main  error 
— ^The  newness  of  each  day's  world — The  self  as 
a  factor  in  the  new  world  of  to-day — ^The  ideals  of 
to-day  as  factors  in  to-morrow — The  materials  and 
ideals  for  each  new  world — Conditions  and  mastery 
of  conditions — Religion  and  creative  idealism — Faith 
and  the  transformation  of  life — Cooperation  with 
God  in  the  making  a  new  world  each  day — God  and 
the  creative  ideals — Ideals  and  material  fact — Man's 
part  in  the  process — The  prophet  and  the  creative 
ideal — The  rapture  and  ecstasy  in  the  creative  ideal. 

VI 

The  way  religious  ideals  organize  the  material 
life — The   influence   of   the   temple — ^The   religious 


ANALYSIS  OF  THE  ARGUMENT      xi 

league — ^The  decline  of  the  Roman  empire  and  the 
reUgious  factors— The  guilds  of  the  Middle  Ages 
and  their  art — The  force  of  religion  as  inspiration 
to  material  mastery — The  group  ideal  and  man's 
material  mastery — The  religious  ideal  and  its  dog- 
matic content — The  religious  ideal  and  national 
safety — ^The  religious  ideal  and  international  fellow- 
ship. 

VII 
Religion  and  human  organization — ^The  religious 
factor  in  marriage;  in  blood  revenge;  in  the  treaty; 
in  courts  and  vows — The  place  of  religion  to-day 
in  social  relations — National  churches  and  their 
function — ^The  meaning  of  religious  conformity — 
Religion  and  working  faith — The  religious  factor 
in  our  culture,  at  home  and  abroad — Religious 
propaganda — The  effect  of  scientific  doubt  upon 
man's  activity — Evolution  and  rehgious  faith. 

VIII 

The  three  main  emphases  in  man's  life  of  the 
soul — ^The  emotional  emphasis — ^The  intellectual  em- 
phasis— ^The  pragmatic  emphasis — Why  religion  is 
so  often  thought  of  as  mainly  emotional — ^The  two 
types  of  emotional  religion,  the  aesthetic  and  the 
mystical — ^Byzantime  Christianity  and  the  emo- 
tional life — New  England's  religious  life — ^The  in- 
tellectual emphasis  with  its  dogmatic  and  specu- 
lative interests — The  pragmatic  type  with  its  emo- 
tional or  intellectual  color. 


xii     ANALYSIS  OF  THE  ARGUMENT 

IX 

Ethics  and  religion  in  past  relationships — Both 
are  concepts  that  have  hitherto  resisted  satisfactory 
analysis — Knowledge  and  mystery  for  the  naive  and 
the  modern  mind — ^The  constant  relation  of  the 
self  to  the  All — Religion  and  science  as  "explana- 
tions" of  the  universe — Ethics  deal  with  our  rela- 
tions to  fellow  men,  and  religion  with  God  and  the 
universe  of  which  our  fellow  men  are  parts — The 
imperative  of  life — ^The  physical,  the  psychic,  the 
moral  and  the  religious  imperative — The  formula- 
tions of  these  imperatives  changing  constantly — 
The  ultimate  relationship  in  a  highest  ideal — ^The 
explosive  force  of  religious  and  ethical  revelation — 
The  test  of  vitality  in  both. 

X 

Political  attitudes  to  religion  and  the  church — 
The  Reformation  and  the  church — ^The  United 
States  and  established  religion — The  fundamental 
reason  underlying  change  of  view — What  is  divine 
right? — ^The  church  and  the  law  of  service — 
Religious  toleration  and  its  basis — Religion  and 
group  solidarity — ^The  cultural  social  bond — The 
claim  to  absolute  knowledge  in  Middle  Ages — 
Freedom  and  social  solidarity — The  transforming 
character  of  religious  experience — Creeds  and  their 
uses — ^The  use  of  words  and  the  personal  equation 
— ^The  personal  rights  within  an  organization — 
Faith  and  its  constant  need  for  new  forms  of  ex- 
pression. 


INTRODUCTION 

The  opening  years  of  our  century  mark 
a  world-wide  awakening.  Men  rise  to 
question  all  the  older  formulae,  and  doubt 
has  almost  become  the  mark  of  a  vital 
religion.  Men  and  women  ask  with  an  in- 
creasing earnestness  for  a  reason  for  the 
faith  that  is  in  them.  Many  are  troubled 
by  the  doubts  and  difficulties  that  are 
raised  on  all  sides;  some  timid  ones  are 
quite  panic-stricken.  It  is  in  the  hope 
that  some  help  may  be  rendered  to  those 
whose  own  faith  may  have  been  shaken,  or, 
if  not,  to  those  who  are  in  contact  with 
thoughtful  and  earnest  doubt,  that  these 
lines  are  penned. 

These  few  chapters  are  written  with  no 
purpose  of  setting  forth  an  elaborate  de- 
fense of  the  several  items  of  a  system  of 
Christian  faith,  but  simply  to  clear  the 
way  for  an  inquiry.  We  wish  to  show 
the  importance  and  dignity  of  the  religious 
claim,  and  to  demand  for  it  the  attention 
its  past  history  and  present  power  deserves. 

xiii 


xlv  INTRODUCTION 

Even  In  institutions  that  claim  to  be 
Christian  the  fundamental  things  of  a 
religious  intelligence  are  all  too  often  but 
lightly  dealt  with.  It  is  often  assumed 
that  young  minds  still  start  with  the  pre- 
suppositions of  the  past,  whereas,  in  fact, 
the  teachings  of  certain  classrooms  in 
that  same  institution  may  have  worked 
havoc  with  all  those  presuppositions.  It  is 
to  thoughtful  men  and  women  who  are 
not  in  any  sense  specialists  on  the  fields 
here  touched  upon  that  these  chapters  are 
written,  and  the  hope  is  that  they  may 
give  a  point  of  view  from  which  a  fruitful 
study  of  religion  is  possible.  Great  conden- 
sation has  been  aimed  at,  and  many  longer 
expositions  have  been  sacrificed  to  keep  the 
book  within  certain  limits  both  of  compass 
and  of  price.  May  the  reading  of  these 
pages  strengthen  intelligent  faith  and  lead 
to  a  vital  union  with  God's  purpose  as  re- 
vealed in  the  person  and  work  of  Christ 
Jesus  our  Lord. 


CHAPTER  I 

Our  General  Assumptions 

Any  definition  of  religion  must  be  at  the 
outset  seemingly  vague  and  tentative.  The 
usefulness  of  any  definition  depends  upon 
the  purpose  of  the  definition,  and  no  defi- 
nition can  be  exact  for  all  purposes.  The 
failure  to  remember  this  has  given  rise  to  a 
bewildering  variety  of  definitions  of  reli- 
gion, for,  like  all  great  fundamental  words, 
the  very  usefulness  of  the  conception  is 
its  inclusive  character.  Such  words  as 
"beauty ,"  "order,"  "line,"  "circle,"and  "life" 
are  only  definite  when  the  context  is  known 
in  which  they  are  used,  for  all  these  words 
describe  a  great  variety  of  our  common 
human  experiences.  How  do  we  conceive 
of  the  beauty  of  a  flower,  or  of  music,  or  of 
a  human  face?  What  is  beauty?  When 
we  say  line,  do  we  mean  a  definite  mark- 
ing, or  an  imaginary  circle  like  the  equator, 
or  a  row  of  objects?  Religion  may  be 
thought  of  as  a  definite,  concrete  develop- 
ment with  cult  and  dogma,  or  as  an  inde- 

1 


2  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

finable  attitude  of  the  human  soul  to  the 
world  of  infinite  being.  Most  of  us  have 
visual  and  particularistic  minds.  When 
anyone  says  "circle,"  we  think  generally  of 
a  particular  circle,  which  then  stands  in 
some  sort  of  symbolic  relation  to  all  cir- 
cles. So  also  when  we  hear  the  word 
"religion"  we  generally  think  of  some 
complex  of  doctrines,  or  rites,  or  of  some 
organization  which  we  know,  and  only  that 
which  resembles  what  we  thus  know  seems  to 
us  religion.  A  moment's  reflection  will  show 
us  that  such  a  definition  is  too  narrow  for 
our  purpose.  Religious  phenomena  are  so 
widely  various  that  they  cannot  be  judged 
by  one  type  or  one  level  of  religious  cul- 
ture. Indeed,  it  is  difficult  to  find  a  com- 
mon characteristic  that  links  all  religious 
phenomena  together.  Not  even  belief  in  a 
personal  God  can  be  treated  as  absolutely 
essential,  lest  we  rule  out  the  higher  forms 
of  contemplative  Buddhism  which  no  one 
denies  are  religious.  For  our  wide  pur- 
pose, then,  we  may  define  religion  as  an 
inward  attitude  of  reverent  relationship  to  that 
which  is  thought  of  as  for  the  time  of  supreme 
moment^   resulting   in   outward   expressions^ 


OUR  GENERAL  ASSUMPTIONS  3 

'personal  and  social,  that  form  complexes  of 
rites,  beliefs,  and  customs. 

This  definition  is  both  vague  and  very- 
general.  It  must,  in  fact,  be  so  if  it  is  to 
include  all  the  things  which  at  one  time 
or  another  we  have  called  religious.  And 
each  one  who  reads  it  is  likely  to  compare 
it  with  some  one  clear  definite  religious 
fact,  which  has  become  to  his  mind  sym- 
bolic for  all  religious  facts,  and  criticize  it 
accordingly.  But  for  the  present  we  must 
be  content  with  what  is  confessedly  vague, 
in  order  not  to  exclude  from  our  examina- 
tion things  we  distinctly  feel  have  to  do 
with  religion. 

The  moment  we  have  so  defined  religion 
there  can  be  no  question  as  to  the  im- 
portance of  its  study.  And  this  without 
any  regard  to  the  farther  question  as  to 
how  far  there  is  any  reality  corresponding 
to  that  which  a  man  thinks  at  the  moment 
to  be  of  supreme  importance.  This  reli- 
gious attitude  has  played  and  still  plays  a 
prominent,  if  not  the  leading,  part  in 
human  history.  If  one  is  asked  to  study 
any  particular  religion,  many  a  cultivated 
man  turns  away  at  once  from  some  feature 


4  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

that  he  regards  as  outgrown — it  may  be 
miracle  or  sin  or  redemption — but  no  cul- 
tivated man  can  really  deny  the  historical 
importance  of  these  and  other  religious 
concepts.  They  have,  along  with  many 
other  religious  notions,  made  and  unmade 
history. 

Mohammedanism  may  seem  to  any  of 
us  essentially  false,  but  the  faith  of  mil- 
lions in  Mohammedanism  remains  a  car- 
dinal fact  in  the  politics  of  Europe.  It  has 
dominated  the  whole  attitude  of  Europe 
toward  the  Balkan  states,  and  plays  an 
important  part  in  the  foreign  policy  of 
England.  What  may  seem  to  us  absurd 
and  trivial  in  the  extreme  may  become, 
with  religious  feeling  behind  it,  of  momen- 
tous import.  What  men  and  women  link 
with  their  highest  hopes  and  most  real  fears 
is  never  for  them  trivial  or  unimportant. 
The  belief  of  the  Sepoys  in  India  that  they 
had  to  touch  with  their  lips  the  fat  of 
cows  and  pigs  as  they  bit  off  the  ends  of 
their  greased  cartridges  is  said  to  have 
been  not  one  of  the  least  causes  of  the 
Indian  Mutiny.  To  us  this  may  seem 
trivial,  and  we  may  wonder  at  the  strong 


OUR  GENERAL  ASSUMPTIONS 


n 


!J 


prejudice  against  the  fat  of  cows  and  pigs, 
but  we  should  also  try  to  understand 
the  tremendous  power  that  is  behind  this 
prejudice,  and  to  comprehend  the  wonder- 
ful vitality  of  this  force  which,  under  the 
name  of  religion,  has  changed  more  than 
once  the  face  of  the  world's  civilization. 

It  ought  to  seem  inexcusable  that  any 
really  scientific  man  should  to-day  ignore 
religion,  no  matter  what  he  may  think  of 
the  objective  reality  postulated  in  its  forms. 
It  surely  is  anomalous  that  one  of  the 
most  brilliant  writers  on  ethics  should  at- 
tempt to  sketch  its  progress  in  Europe  and 
forget  to  mention  Christianity.  Whatever 
may  yet  happen,  the  history  of  Europe  is 
wrapped  up,  not  only  in  religion,  but  in 
religious  forms,  and  to-day  no  one  can 
understand  the  rapid  changes  taking  place 
in  society  without  an  intelligent  under- 
standing of  both  the  religious  revolt  going 
on,  and  of  the  strength  of  even  evidently 
antiquated  forms. 

Men  enter,  it  is  true,  with  much  preju- 
dice to-day  upon  the  study  of  any  par- 
ticular religious  party,  for  there  are  in 
all  religious   organizations   many  elements 


6  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

which  seem  to  the  modern  mind  patently 
outworn;  and  yet  this  very  fact  should  be 
a  reason  for  thoughtful  and  discriminating 
study.  More  than  ever  in  a  democracy  is 
it  needful  to  have  men  free  from  all 
gtoss  superstitions,  to  have  men  and  women 
clear-eyed  as  to  causes  and  effects,  and 
trained  to  reason  from  effects  to  causes. 
It  is  asserted  that  workingmen  deal  so 
much  with  machinery  that  they  no  longer 
are  tempted  to  go  to  magic  for  an  ex- 
planation of  the  unknown.  But  is  the 
automatism  of  the  machine  a  true  picture 
of  our  highest  life?  Is  there  no  reality  to 
correspond  to  the  sense  of  power  and  self- 
direction  that  makes  a  man  feel  himself 
more  than  a  machine.'^ 

If  the  religious  forms  of  to-day  have  no 
reality  behind  them,  if  the  energy  and 
life  that  is  now  found  running  in  religious 
channels  is  wasted,  then  the  sooner  we 
know  it  the  better.  The  Socialist  party  in 
Germany  has  abandoned  official  opposition 
to  religion  on  the  ground  that  it  is  a  private 
and  personal  matter.  This  may  be  wise 
from  a  party  standpoint,  but,  personally, 
the  writer  feels  that  no  man  has  a  right  to 


OUR  GENERAL  ASSUMPTIONS         7 

a  simply  negative  attitude;  either  we  are 
face  to  face  with  a  vast  delusion  that 
holds  back  the  race,  or  we  are  in  contact 
with  a  mighty  force  which  we  need  and 
the  cause  of  progress  needs. 

Even  when  we  recognize  most  freely  that 
superstition  is  mingled  with  nearly  all 
existent  religious  cults  and  dogmas,  the 
question  remains.  What  gives  these  super- 
stitions power?  And  if  we  set  about  dis- 
placing the  superstitions,  we  must  raise  the 
question.  Are  we  giving  anything  in  its 
place?  A  wooden  leg  is  a  poor  substitute 
for  one  of  bone  and  muscle,  but  to  go 
about  simply  sawing  off  wooden  legs  would 
not  be  a  helpful  activity.  Granting  that 
superstition  marks  much  of  our  religious 
usage,  we  should  try  to  understand  what 
this  superstition  stands  for,  and,  seeing  its 
place  in  human  life,  try  to  discover  its 
function  and  its  defects. 

It  is  a  common  attitude  in  France  and 
Italy  for  men  to  say  that  religion  is  "good 
for  the  women,"  and  while  the  men  ignore 
it  and  its  claims  on  them  personally,  they 
insist  upon  maintaining  the  forms  for  the 
sake   of   the    "women   and   the   children." 


8  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

Such  an  attitude  cannot  be  long  retained 
while  women  are  daily  asserting  the  essen- 
tial homogeneity  of  human  life.  Religion  is 
either  a  force  for  all  or  for  none.  It  is 
either  true  for  men  and  women  or  false 
for  men  and  women. 

The  intelligent  man  of  to-day  must  try, 
at  least,  to  understand  religion.  One  of 
the  ablest  of  America's  Western  politicians 
failed  utterly  to  attain  his  political  ambi- 
tions because  he  entirely  misunderstood  the 
psychology  of  the  religious  community  in 
which  he  worked.  While  one  of  the  ele- 
ments that  made  up  Lincoln's  strength  was 
his  wonderfully  clear  comprehension  of  the 
religious  feeling  of  the  common  man,  and 
his  power  of  appeal,  in  utterly  undogmatic 
forms,  to  the  religious  feelings  of  his 
hearers. 

So  that  from  any  point  of  view  the  cul- 
tivated man  to-day  must  try  to  under- 
stand this  mighty  force  which  is  still 
building  temples  and  churches,  still  laying 
the  foundation  for  new  cultures  and  new 
states,  and  which  is  still  the  theme  upon 
which  men  ponder  most  deeply  and  most 
earnestly,   and  for  which  they  will  make 


OUR  GENERAL  ASSUMPTIONS  9 

even   greater   sacrifices   than   for   country 
and  home. 

From  time  to  time  we  hear  it  said  that 
religion  is  dying  out,  or  that  this  or  that 
rehgion  is  passing,  or  that  reason  is  taking 
the  place  of  religion.  Such  statements  have 
been  made  at  all  times,  only  to  find  them 
belied  by  some  tremendous  uprising  such  as 
the  birth  of  Christianity  itself,  or  the  rise 
of  Buddhism,  or  the  religious  awakening  of 
the  Reformation,  or  the  Evangelical  re- 
vival. Nor  are  there  any  conclusive  evi- 
dences to-day  that  religion  is  less  of  a 
force  than  it  ever  was.  At  no  time  have 
all  men  been  religious,  any  more  than  all 
men  were  musical.  There  is  also  a  great 
difference  in  the  way  the  religious  life 
manifests  its  vitality.  To  a  Roman  of 
Cicero's  time  the  doubts  and  negations  of 
his  day  seemed,  without  any  question,  irre- 
ligious. We,  looking  back  upon  that  age, 
realize  that  Vergil's  Epic  was  a  great  re- 
ligious poem  marking  the  rising  wave  of 
religious  feeling,  some  of  whose  very  ex- 
pressions were  the  persecutions  of  rival 
faiths.  Nor  is  it  doubtful  that  the  Roman 
empire   was   in  the  midst  of  a  great  re- 


10  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

ligious  and  ethical  revival,  the  best  fruits 
of  which  were  Stoicism,  Cynicism,  Epi- 
cureanism, Gnosticism,  and  at  last  the 
Roman  Church. 

There  come  times  in  the  history  of  the 
intellectual  world  when  it  seems  as  though 
a  particular  trend  has  at  last  reached 
definite  victory;  but  the  shout  of  triumph  is 
hardly  still  before  another  wave  leaves  the 
school  mourning  its  shattered  idols.  Not 
long  ago  a  rather  shallow  materialism  had 
seemingly  taken  final  possession  of  the 
great  upper  middle  class  of  England  and 
this  country,  and  just  when  it  had  seem- 
ingly become  well-nigh  hopeless  to  attempt 
a  restatement  of  religion  a  great  wave  of 
transcendental  idealism  swept  over  the 
minds  of  men,  and  transformed  their  think- 
ing almost  without  their  consciousness  of 
the  vast  change  that  was  taking  place  and 
religion  came  again  to  its  own. 

Many  times  the  passing  of  religious 
forms  has  been  hailed  by  the  critics  of  re- 
ligion as  a  final  victory  and  bewailed  by 
its  friends  as  a  last  signal  defeat,  only  to 
reveal  the  fact  that  defeated  formality 
made  way  for  larger  life,  and  quickened 


OUR  GENERAL  ASSUMPTIONS        11 

energies  were  taking  the  place  of  routine 
and  stagnation. 

Even  were  we  convinced  that  what  we 
know  as  rehgion  was  being  really  de- 
throned, and  other  convictions  were  taking 
its  place,  we  would  still  have  to  understand 
religion  to  understand  the  past;  and  his- 
tory would  be  a  strange  enigma  to  any 
man  who  had  lost  touch  with  the  tre- 
mendous significance  of  religion  for  stormy 
human  life.  There  is,  however,  no  evi- 
dence that  will  stand  investigation  that 
religion  is  being  displaced  in  modern  life. 
True  it  is  that  old  forms  give  way  to  new 
expressions,  but  as  a  mere  force  with 
which  the  historian  or  the  statesman  must 
reckon  religious  feeling  is  to-day  as  im- 
portant as  it  probably  ever  was  in  human 
history.  To-day  in  England  the  leader- 
ship of  the  new  liberal  democracy  is  in 
the  hands  of  men  trained  in  the  non- 
conformist churches.  Nor  can  any 
thoughtful  student  of  German  social  ad- 
vance fail  to  note  a  strange  but  great 
spiritual  awakening  which,  amid  many 
differing  manifestations,  has  an  underlying 
unity,  and  which,  like  great  spiritual  awak- 


12  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

enings  before  it,  is  born  of  the  established 
state  rehgion,  but  fails  to  be  recognized  by 
the  parent  church.  It  is  only  when  the 
various  forms  under  which  religion  has  dis- 
played its  energy  are  too  closely  identified 
with  religion  that  it  seems  to  many  to  be 
slipping  away. 

Any  inquiry  into  the  character  and  func- 
tion of  religion  must,  however,  be  upon  the 
basis  of  some  understanding  of  what  we 
mean  by  the  word  "know."  What  are 
known  in  philosophy  as  the  epistomo- 
logical  questions  must  be  faced.  It  is 
fashionable  now  to  say  of  religion  that  we 
cannot  "prove"  the  positions  we  hold. 
Here,  however,  it  is  for  us  to  understand 
what  we  mean  by  "prove."  It  was  once 
fashionable  to  speak  of  mathematical  cer- 
tainty, and  from  Spinoza  to  Leibnitz  the 
effort  has  constantly  been  made  to  reduce 
the  proofs  for  the  higher  values  of  life  to 
mathematical  formulae.  And  in  scholastic 
theology,  whether  in  its  most  consummate 
form  in  the  hands  of  Thomas  Aquinas  or 
in  the  mutilated  and  dismembered  systems 
of  Protestant  imitators,  the  forms  of  syllo- 
gistic   thinking    have    been    assumed    as 


OUR  GENERAL  ASSUMPTIONS        13 

methods  by  which  new  truth  apart  from 
experience  about  God,  the  soul,  and  immor- 
taHty  may  be  reached. 

This  faith  in  mathematical  certainty  is 
based,  however,  upon  a  misconception — a 
common  misconception — namely,  that  the 
elaborate  science  by  which  we  hold  to- 
gether and  deal  with  material  facts  is  a 
way  of  reaching  truth  apart  from  ex- 
perience. All  mathematics  demands  is 
absolute  self-consistency,  and  you  may 
start  with  any  set  of  definitions  you  may 
please.  Our  senses  give  us  only  three  di- 
mensions; but  if  you  choose  to  set  out 
with  four  or  five  or  x  dimensions,  you  can 
build  up  a  mathematics  on  that  basis  just 
as  well.  It  is,  in  fact,  a  shorthand  by 
which  we  sum  up  elaborate  processes  that 
would  otherwise  bafile  us.  It  enables  us  to 
deal  with  vast  ranges  of  experiences,  like 
those  of  astronomy  or  bridge-building, 
which  we  could  not  manage  without  it.  It 
helps  us  to  great  generalizations  whose  ulti- 
mate test,  however,  must  again  be  ex- 
perience. The  sureness  of  its  results 
depends  upon  the  accuracy  with  which 
we  use  the   definitions    and  concepts  and 


14.  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

the  exactness  of  our  record  of  the  ex- 
periences/ 

These  abstractions  far  surpass  our  actual 
experiences.  We  postulate  a  perfect  circle 
or  a  straight  line,  although  we  have  never 
seen  nor  can  ever  make  a  perfect  circle  or  a 
straight  line.  They  remain  abstract  ideals, 
abstractions  indeed  from  actual  physical 
experiences,  but  transcending  all  individual 
particular  experiences.  And  our  place  in 
the  universe  seems  marked  off  as  over 
against  the  animal  creation  by  just  this 
capacity  for  ideals  whose  reality  is  a 
matter,  not  of  even  possible  demonstra- 
tion, but  of  fundamental  faith  in  a  reality 
ever  becoming. 

To-day  we  have  entered  upon  a  new  era 
of  experimentation.  We  test  our  conclu- 
sions, and  by  a  series  of  repetitions  under 
known  conditions  establish  the  chain  of 
conditions  under  which  a  particular  effect 


'  At  the  same  time  this  power  of  conceptual  abstraction,  which  is  the 
basis  of  language  and  logic,  has  value  for  life  only  in  connection  with  our 
empiric  experiences,  and  in  and  of  itself  can  give  ils  no  guarantee  of  the 
empiric  existence  of  the  relations  it  postulates.  Thus  a  mathematical 
line  is  the  shortest  distance  between  two  points,  but  we  have  no  empiric 
experience  of  either  a  point  or  a  Une,  and  mathematical  abstraction  can- 
not guarantee  to  us  their  emi)iric  reality.  This  was  the  weakness  of 
Anselm's  position  in  hb  controversy  with  Gannilo. 


OUR  GENERAL  ASSUMPTIONS        15 

takes  place.  Out  of  the  complexity  of  life 
we  seek  to  separate  happenings,  and  to 
bring  these  happenings  into  relationship 
with  each  other,  and  to  fix  the  conditions 
under  which  certain  happenings  will  always 
take  place.  Thus  we  know  that  hydrogen 
and  oxygen  may  be  mingled  in  certain  pro- 
portions, and  that  if  then  an  electric  spark 
be  passed  through  them  they  will  combine 
and  two  colorless  gases  become  fluid  water, 
H,0.  So  sure  are  the  results  of  certain 
experiments  that  we  can  generalize  from 
these  experiences,  and  these  generaliza- 
tions we  call  laws.  These  generalizations 
may  within  limits  be  tested  over  and  over 
again,  until  the  universality  and  uni- 
formity of  the  "law"  becomes  a  matter  of 
relative  certainty.  If  a  new  comet  appears, 
the  assumption  will  not  be  doubted  by  an 
intelligent  man  that  it  will  act  in  a  certain 
way  according  to  its  initial  speed,  its 
weight,  and  relation  in  space  to  other 
heavenly  bodies.  We  say  "we  know"  that 
H  and  O  will  combine  to  form  water,  and 
that  attraction  is  in  a  certain  ratio  to  the 
square  of  the  distance. 

As  once  men  sought  to  reduce  religion 


16  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

and  aesthetics  and  ethics  and,  indeed,  all 
the  higher  values  to  mathematical  formulae 
in  the  mistaken  assurance  that  mathemati- 
cal science  was  a  key  to  all  knowledge,  so 
to-day  the  modern  scientific  experimental 
method  is  openly  proclaimed  as  the  one 
gateway  to  knowledge. 

Moreover,  this  claim  seems  often  justi- 
fied by  the  vast  advances  it  has  enabled  us 
to  make  in  the  mastery  of  the  world  about 
us.  It  has  helped  us  to  understand  our  own 
mental  processes  and  to  measure  the  ma- 
terial world  around  us.  It  seems  ungrate- 
ful to  point  out  the  limitations  of  a  method 
to  which  we  may  be  said  to  almost  owe  our 
modern  world.  Yet,  in  point  of  fact,  the 
experimental  method  has  extremely  dis- 
tinct and  trying  limitations.  Do  what  we 
will,  the  rudeness  of  our  senses,  the  limits 
of  the  eye  and  ear,  of  taste  and  touch  are 
so  marked  that  even  with  all  possible  elimi- 
nation of  the  personal  equation  our  approach 
to  the  facts  must  remain  distinctly  relative. 

And  further,  at  best  only  a  small  part  of 
our  world  of  experience  can  ever  be  sub- 
jected to  any  exact  experimental  method. 
We  cannot  dogmatically  say  how  far  we 


OUR  GENERAL  ASSUMPTIONS        17 

may  yet  succeed  in  extending  the  experi- 
mental method  to  regions  that  now  may 
seem  beyond  its  scope,  for  it  would  be  a 
foolhardy  thing  to  try  to-day  to  fix  the 
limits  of  experimental  science  or  restrict  its 
field.  We,  nevertheless,  must  realize  that 
there  are  distinct  limitations,  and  that  even 
within  these  we  must  often  be  content  with 
degrees  of  assurances  ranging  from  the 
positive  conviction  that  falling  bodies  in  all 
space  obey  the  laws  that  rule  on  the  earth's 
surface,  to  the  tentative  acceptance  of  the 
somewhat  doubtful  hypothesis  that  the 
unit  of  matter  is  the  electrical  ion. 

These  limitations  are  fixed  by  the  fact  of 
life's  great  complexity,  and  the  fact  that 
we  can  theoretically  never  repeat  any 
experience.  We  can  only  attempt  an  ap- 
proximation. The  conditions  of  a  simple 
chemical  experiment  can,  for  all  practical 
purposes,  be  exactly  repeated;  but  as  the 
complexity  grows  greater  and  greater  we 
must  trust  to  shrewd  analogies  and  gen- 
eralizations on  the  basis  of  ever  smaller 
areas  of  experimentation.  We  can  never 
"know"  that  protection  or  free  trade  was 
good  or  bad  for  America  after  the  war,  for 


18  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

no  experience  can  ever  be  repeated,  and 
social  experimentation  can  never  repro- 
duce the  conditions  of  any  historical 
situation.  Conclusive  proof  cannot  be 
forthcoming.  It  will  always  be  open  to 
anyone  to  "prove"  that  Napoleon  was  a 
curse  or  blessing.  We  can  never  experi- 
ment with  and  without  Napoleons  under 
the  same  set  of  circumstances.  The  con- 
ditions of  social  equilibrium  can  never  be 
exactly  the  same.  If,  therefore,  one  means 
by  "scientific  method"  the  experimental 
table  of  the  laboratory,  the  limits  are  so 
well  defined  that  most  of  life  that  is  really 
worth  while  can  never  be  tested  by  the 
"scientific"  method. 

However,  experimentation  is  only  one 
feature  of  the  really  scientific  method  of 
to-day.  What  we  really  have  which  sep- 
arates us  from  the  childhood  of  knowledge 
is  some  attempt  at  systematic  generaliza- 
tions from  observed  experiences.  We  have 
improved  the  records  of  experience.  We 
have  learned  to  critically  estimate  all 
records,  and  in  many  ways  have  learned 
to  eliminate  errors  by  observation  of  aver- 
ages.    We  have  improved   our   sense  ex- 


OUR  GENERAL  ASSUMPTIONS        19 

periences,  by  exact  measurements,  longer 
sight,  stronger  sight,  and  mechanical  meth- 
ods of  fixing  experiences,  as  in  the  photo- 
graph, etc.  We  have  more  definite  and 
more  trustworthy  records  of  the  actual 
happenings,  and  so  we  can  better  describe 
or  guess  at  the  conditions  of  a  particular 
event.  Thus  slowly,  for  instance,  we  are 
learning  to  forecast  the  weather  by  ob- 
servations of  the  conditions  that  have 
governed  particular  changes  in  the  past, 
and  although  the  complexity  and  the  in- 
stability of  the  factors  with  which  the 
experts  deal  are  exceedingly  great,  we  yet 
have  firm  faith  that  certain  very  definite 
laws  underlie  these  manifold  variations.  As 
we  watch  these  variations  we  are  struck 
with  the  regularity  of  summer,  autumn, 
winter,  and  spring,  and  notice  how  under 
all  seeming  change  they  yet  succeed  each 
other  in  a  certain  uniformity. 

This  faith  in  uniformity  can  never  be 
the  result  of  an  all-inclusive  experience. 
Gravitation  might  cease  to  act  in  the  same 
ratio  of  distance.  Bichlorid  of  mercury 
might  become  a  wholesome  article  of  food. 
But,    in    actuality,    a    systematization    of 


20  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

experiences  far  short  of  inclusiveness  is 
suflBcient  to  convince  us  of  the  truth  of 
our  generaHzations.  In  fact,  the  danger  is 
the  other  way.  We  are  incHned  to  accept 
a  generaHzation  as  true  on  far  too  small  a 
range  of  experience. 

The  great  value  of  the  experiment  is  the 
facility  it  gives  for  repeating  under  known 
conditions  our  experiences,  and  the  as- 
surance that  comes  from  experimentation, 
prediction,  and  fulfillment  of  the  predic- 
tion is  very  great.  iVt  the  same  time  the 
complexity  and  individual  character  of  our 
higher  values,  and  the  subtle  changes  that 
take  place  below  the  range  of  our  exactest 
observation,  force  on  us  the  real  crudeness 
of  all  our  most  scientific  work.  Take,  for 
instance,  the  bafiling  character  of  the  finer 
appeals  to  our  sense  of  taste.  No  one 
knows  what  are  the  subtle  conditions  that 
make  certain  wines  agreeable  to  the  trained 
palate.  It  depends,  no  doubt,  upon  slight 
but  marked  characteristics  in  the  yeasts 
and  fermentation  processes,  but  no  chem- 
istry can  describe  what  the  tongue  in- 
stantly recognizes.  The  photographic  plate 
in   its   exposure,    development,   and   fixing 


OUR  GENERAL  ASSUMPTIONS        21 

represents  an  elaborate  and  well-understood 
chemical  history,  but  no  science  is  exact 
enough  to  quite  predict  the  curious  indi- 
vidual characteristics  that  occasionally 
mark  plates  off  from  each  other,  though, 
as  far  as  human  skill  can  go,  they  are 
subjected  to  the  same  treatment. 

In  other  words,  the  splendid  usefulness  of 
the  experimental  method  should  not  blind 
us  to  the  fact  that  a  vast  range  of  ex- 
perience and  assurance  lies  wholly  beyond 
its  scope.  The  demand,  therefore,  that 
our  religious  assurance  rest  upon  the  same 
plane  with  assurances  born  of  the  experi- 
mental laboratory,  or  that  finally  religion 
must  stand  the  laboratory  test,  is  one  of  the 
errors  which,  like  the  error  in  regard  to 
mathematics,  confuse  us,  not  only  in  the 
realm  of  religion,  but  of  nearly  all  the 
higher  values  and  the  more  subtle  and 
complex  experiences. 

It  is  not  that  there  is  a  sharp  line  drawn 
between  "reason"  and  "faith,"  but  simply 
that  a  vast  range  of  life  is  in  varied  degree 
beyond  the  scope  of  certain  well-defined 
and  highly  useful  modes  of  thought,  and 
that  neither  the  method  of  mathematics. 


22  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

nor  yet  that  of  experimentation,  does  more 
than  help  us  organize  and  control  our 
experiences. 

We  all  have  experiences  and  assurances 
quite  beyond  the  reach  of  mathematical 
description  or  experimental  test.  The  per- 
sonal judgments  as  to  literature,  art;  the 
personal  life  in  its  complex  affections  and 
distastes;  the  psychic  reactions  whose  com- 
plexity makes  it  impossible  often  to  say 
whether  one  man  is  normal  and  another 
insane  or  not:  all  these  judgments  rest,  not 
on  some  foundationless  emotionalism,  nor 
still  less  upon  authority  external  to  the 
experiencing  mind,  but  upon  a  long  his- 
torical, social,  and  individual  experience 
that  in  its  complexity  and  profundity 
baffles  all  complete  analysis. 

It  is  this  complexity  that  has  led  men  to 
say  of  religion  that  it  is  a  matter  of  emotional 
reaction,  or  deals  with  things  that  "can- 
not be  proved."  It  is  true  that  religion 
involves  emotional  reaction,  but  it  also  de- 
mands intelligence  and  appeals  to  the  will. 
In  fact,  as  in  the  case  of  all  the  higher  and 
more  complex  values,  its  tests  are  the 
reaction  of  the  whole  personal  life,  and. 


OUR  GENERAL  ASSUMPTIONS       23 

indeed,  of  the  whole  social  life.  Nor  can  it 
be  "proved"  in  the  same  sense  that  we  can 
check  a  balance  sheet,  or  find  out  whether 
there  is  carbon  dioxyde  in  the  atmosphere, 
but  neither  can  we  "prove"  the  high  value 
of  Wagner's  "Parsifal"  or  the  ideal  value 
of  democracy.  Not  even  the  common  con- 
sent of  all  the  rest  of  mankind  would 
convince  some  of  us  that  despotism  was  a 
better  form  of  government  than  democracy, 
but  the  way  we  approach  the  question  as 
to  the  "truth"  of  democracy,  that  is,  its 
real  inward  value,  is  exactly  the  method  of 
approach  for  testing  the  truth  or  inner 
value  of  religion. 

A  scientific  method  in  examining  reli- 
gion will  therefore  avail  itself  of  all  possible 
tests  of  truth.  We  will  try  to  objectively 
study  and  weigh  history,  to  master  as  far 
as  possible  the  psychology  of  the  religious 
reaction,  to  understand  amid  the  com- 
plexity of  its  character  the  various  ele- 
ments that  constitute  religion  both  in  its 
inner  life  and  its  outward  manifestations. 
And  in  judging  religious  values  there  can  be 
but  one  final  test,  namely,  their  ethical  out- 
come.    Not,  indeed,  that  religion  is  "sim- 


M  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

ply"  ethics,  or  that  ethics  is  the  whole  of 
religion,  but  because  conduct  and  life  are 
the  only  objective  tests  which  can  reveal 
to  us  the  inner  meaning  of  religious  reac- 
tions. In  the  long  run  the  ultimate  test 
mankind  will  apply  to  the  various  religious 
forms  and  claims  will  be  the  outcome  in 
personal  and  social  character.  And  this  test 
is  being  constantly  made. 

The  difficulty  of  applying  this  test  is 
exceedingly  great.  All  manner  of  elements 
enter  into  social  and  personal  character — 
heredity,  climate,  economic  level,  class  at- 
mosphere, political  color,  and  other  even 
more  subtle  factors;  and  yet,  looking  over 
the  history  of  the  race,  it  is  certainly  as  yet 
impossible  to  point  to  any  one  factor  of 
greater  importance  than  the  religious  be- 
liefs and  the  religious  reactions  of  history. 
A  really  scientific  study  of  the  fundamen- 
tals of  religion  must  carry  us  far  back  into 
the  early  history  of  the  race,  for  it  is  linked 
with  the  oldest  chapters  in  man's  long 
story.  Evil  elements  mingle  freely  with 
the  better  things,  and  the  student  of  re- 
ligion must  be  clear-eyed  enough  to  search 
resolutely  for  the  good,  and  brave  enough 


OUR  GENERAL  ASSUMPTIONS       25 

to   recognize   and   reject   the   weaker   and 
debasing  part. 

Any  inquiry  into  religion  sooner  or 
later  will  deal  with  two  important  phases 
of  the  question:  first,  What  is  the  func- 
tion of  religion  as  seen  in  its  past  history? 
and,  secondly,  What  is  the  inner  con- 
tent of  religion  as  it  may  now  have  value 
for  us? 


THE  LITERATURE 

The  first  part  of  our  discussion  has  dealt  with 
our  theory  of  knowledge,  and  the  student  who 
desires  to  go  more  thoroughly  into  this  will  have 
to  begin  with  Hume's  "Treatise  of  Human  Nature," 
and  go  thence  to  the  "Critique  of  Pure  Reason," 
by  Kant  (Max  Miiller's  translation),  and  to  Lotze's 
"Microcosmos"  (English  translation).  Compare 
also  with  these  J.  S.  Mill's  "Logic"  and  Sigwart's 
"Logik"  (German,  in  two  volumes),  Karl  Pearson's 
"The  Grammar  of  Science,"  and  the  literature 
there  given.  For  the  more  special  field  of  the 
philosophy  of  religion  an  admirable  work  is  that 
of  Hoeffding,  "Philosophy  of  Religion"  (English  and 
German  translations).  Compare  also  Otto  Pfleid- 
erer's  Gififord  Lectures  on  the  "Philosophy  and 
Development  of  Religion,"  1894.  A  fine  bibliog- 
raphy of  the  field  up  to  the  date  of  its  publication 


26  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

is  in  Jastrow's  excellent  "Study  of  Religion."  Too 
little  known  are  the  fine  treatments  in  somewhat 
poetical  form  of  the  field  by  Fechner,  "Die  Tages- 
ansicht  gegenueber  der  Nachtansicht"  (compare 
especially  pages  3  to  64.  Only  in  German).  Compare 
also  Rudolph  Eucken's  "Problems  of  Human  Life." 


CHAPTER  II 

Primitive  Religion 

The  fruitless  discussion  as  to  whether 
any  human  tribes  had  no  notion  of  a  God 
had  interest  only  as  long  as  men  still  de- 
fended the  existence  of  God  on  the  ground 
of  some  universal  tradition.  But  it  is  now 
fairly  well  established  that  some  sort  of 
religion  has  been  the  possession  of  man- 
kind from  the  earliest  times,  though  how 
far  linked  with  any  notion  of  one  personal 
being  is  another  question,  which  is  also  of 
little  importance.  Nor  is  it  safe  with  our 
present  data  to  dogmatize  on  the  origin 
of  the  religious  beliefs.  That  dreams  and 
ancestor-worship  affect  the  forms  of  re- 
ligion may  be  easily  granted,  but  Herbert 
Spencer's  over-emphasis  of  these  factors 
may  be  now  admitted,  and  they  certainly 
do  not  give  us  the  origin  of  religion. 

Religion  is  essentially  a  certain  attitude 
most  characteristically  called  out  in  the 
presence  of  the  mysterious,  and  the  sudden 
change  from  life  to  death  is  the  most  mys- 

27 


28  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

terious  fact  with  which  the  thinking  mind 
is  early  confronted.  Its  tragic  meaning 
must  force  itself  at  times  even  upon  the 
dullest  and  most  indifferent  of  even  very 
low  grades  of  human  intelligence.  Nor  is 
it  possible  for  any  of  us  to  interpret  life 
about  us  except  in  the  terms  and  symbols 
borrowed  from  our  own  experience.  That 
men,  therefore,  should  dimly  attribute  to 
all  objects,  including  animals,  something  of 
their  own  experienced  psychic  life  was  in- 
evitable, so  that  the  animism  of  Comte  and 
Tylor  may  be  assumed  as  an  almost  uni- 
versal experience.  Thus  children  strike  the 
"naughty"  tree  against  which  they  have 
hurt  themselves,  and  savages  thankfully 
worship  the  clouds  that  bring  them  the 
needed  rain.  On  this  basis  religion  may 
have  grown  and  developed,  but  we  are 
still  as  far  as  ever  from  a  satisfactory 
analysis  of  the  psychic  attitude  of  reverend 
relationship  to  superior  power,  which  in 
various  degrees  and  under  various  forms 
marks  human  life  at  all  the  stages  we  can 
examine. 

The  study  of  the  religion  of  primitive 
men  from  watching  existing  savages  labors 


PRIMITIVE  RELIGION  29 

under  the  disadvantage  that  we  are  ig- 
norant as  to  whether  existing  savages  are 
degenerate  survivals  of  higher  cultures, 
which  seems  in  some  instances  certainly 
to  be  the  case,  or  whether  they  may  not  be 
cases  of  arrested  development.  In  either 
case  the  picture  of  primitive  religious  man- 
kind drawn  from  savagery  will  be  in- 
complete. At  the  same  time  it  is  possible 
broadly  to  sketch  the  religious  attitude  of 
earlier  humanity.  As  Robertson  Smith  has 
made  clear,  it  was  essentially  a  group 
attitude.  Unauthorized  non-group  religion 
became  magic,  and  was  generally  soon  con- 
demned and  dreaded.  The  primitive  reli- 
gion expressed  itself  in  various  cults  and 
then  became  the  fixed  and  stable  elements, 
not  only  of  the  religious,  but  of  the  whole 
group  life.  The  attitude  toward  certain 
objects  and  events  becomes  a  special  one. 
These  objects  and  events,  these  times  and 
places,  become  *' sacred."  The  two  sides  of 
this  attitude  are  represented  in  modern 
discussions  by  words  taken  from  the  Poly- 
nesian, namely,  mdna  and  taboo.  Mdna  is, 
on  the  whole,  the  positive,  and  tahoo  the 
negative  aspect  of  this  sacredness;  and  the 


80  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

whole  of  savage  life  is  more  or  less  lived 
under  the  steady  pressure  of  these  con- 
ceptions. All  important  activities  are 
dominated  by  the  sense  of  mdna  and 
taboo.  There  are  life-giving  energies,  and 
there  are  sources  of  power  open  to  human 
life  when  the  mana  conditions  are  fulfilled, 
and  there  are  times  and  places,  as  well  as 
objects,  so  sacred  that  they  are  taboo,  and 
are  either  to  be  altogether  avoided  or  to  be 
met  by  the  conditions  of  taboo. 

Thus  the  discovery  of  these  conditions 
links  religion  with  all  knowledge,  tradition, 
and  custom.  Primitive  religion  covers  the 
whole  of  life.  The  hunt,  the  feast,  the 
coming  to  maturity  of  the  child,  the  coun- 
cil, the  war,  the  movement  from  place  to 
place  are  all  conditioned  by  the  ever- 
present  mdna  and  taboo.  The  embodied 
traditions  of  the  group  in  the  aged  or  the 
chief,  or,  later  on,  in  the  priest,  and  hard- 
ened more  or  less  in  cult,  ritual,  and  belief, 
controls  the  activity  of  the  savage  from 
infancy  to  death.  He  has  no  standards 
for  truth  other  than  the  age  of  the  tradi- 
tion or  the  universal  acceptance  of  it  by 
those  about  him. 


PRIMITIVE  RELIGION  31 

Thus  it  comes  about  that  sooner  or  later 
the  whole  religious  life  is  brought  under  a 
social  type,  and  other  personal  relations  to 
the  unseen  powers  become  limited  to  magic, 
sorcery,  and  witchcraft,  which  in  varied 
degrees  are  then  under  suspicion,  and  in 
advanced  group  life  are  forbidden  in  the 
interest  of  the  social  bond;  for  religion 
reaches  from  the  smallest  group,  founded 
either  on  kindred  or  industry,  to  encompass 
the  larger  and  larger  groups  which  become 
tribes  and  nations;  and  as  it  teaches  these 
it  becomes  the  bond  which  unites  the 
nation's  life.  We  see  the  process  among 
the  Seven  Nations,  or  Indian  Confederacy, 
and  quite  plainly  in  the  Amphyctionic 
Council  of  the  twelve  Greek  tribes  about 
Delphi;  and  later  the  Union  of  the  Hellenes 
in  the  peace  and  games  of  the  Olympic 
feasts. 

This  union  in  religion  brings  about  per- 
secution of  opposing  cults,  and  particularly 
persecution  of  any  divisive  personal  reli- 
gious practices.  At  the  same  time  con- 
quered tribes  bring  in  their  gods  and 
usages  in  some  sort  of  subordination  to 
the  gods  of  the  conquerors,  and  a  Pan- 


32  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

theon  arises  with  combinations  of  religious 
rites  and  cults.  Thus  the  including  of 
other  religions  enabled  the  Romans  to  hold 
a  world  together  without  too  great  a  sur- 
render on  the  part  of  the  conquered  of 
their  own  national  and  religious  life.  This 
is  a  very  vital  use  of  the  elasticity  that 
polytheism  gave.  It  enabled  the  con- 
queror to  use  the  multitude  of  gods  for  a 
social  purpose.  Thus  increasingly  religion 
becomes  the  social  bond. 

The  outward  forms  of  this  primitive 
group  religion  will  depend  upon  several 
factors.  On  the  one  hand,  the  cultural 
stage  determines  the  character  of  the 
spirits  worshiped.  The  forest  tribe  will 
worship  tree-gods,  the  roving  huntsman  or 
pastoral  nomad  will  have  sacred  places, 
but  can  hardly  erect  temples  or  carry 
about  with  him  any  elaborate  idols  or 
cumbersome  apparatus  of  worship.  The 
myths  and  rites  of  a  fisher  folk  will  reflect 
the  needs  and  life  of  the  worshiping  tribe, 
and  as  mankind  moves  upward  it  carries 
with  it  the  memory  of  various  stages 
through  which  its  life  has  passed.  For  the 
social  significance  of  primitive  religion  as  a 


PRIMITIVE  RELIGION  35 

bond  of  union  presupposes  a  certain  con- 
servative character.  Thus  rehgious  rites 
preserve  the  stone  knife  for  sacrifice  long 
after  metal  has  taken  the  place  of  stone 
in  all  other  activities  of  life.  The  real 
meaning  of  some  religious  usage  is  often 
entirely  lost,  but  the  usage  persists  afid 
exerts  a  peculiar  fascination  because  linked 
with  the  memories  of  so  many  generations. 
Thus  when  the  tribal  fire  was  all  im- 
portant, because  if  it  went  out  savagery 
had  no  means  of  reproducing  it,  it  became 
a  religious  function  to  maintain  the  fire, 
and  we  have  vestal  virgins,  or  the  eternal 
fire  upon  the  altar  of  Christian  churches, 
although  the  real  significance  has  been 
altogether  forgotten. 

The  presence  of  the  mysterious  cycle  of 
the  seasons  soon  impresses  mankind;  and 
even  if  Frazer  exaggerates  somewhat  the 
universal  season  myths  in  their  significance 
for  religion,  and  often  puts  the  cart  before 
the  horse,  yet  it  is  his  distinguished  service 
to  have  pointed  out  the  wide  prevalence  of 
such  an  underlying  current  of  feeling.  The 
stage  of  culture  must,  however,  be  some- 
what advanced.    Myths  are  more  generally, 


34  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

perhaps,  attempted  explanations  of  cus- 
toms whose  real  significance  has  been  for- 
gotten than  the  foundation  of  religious 
rites  and  cults.  But  the  cycle  of  the  sea- 
sons had  early  significance  for  the  race, 
whether  hunting  or  fishing  or  engaged  in 
primitive  agriculture.  Moreover,  the  re- 
turn of  the  seasons  has  ever  something  ir- 
regular and  mysterious  about  it,  and  the 
mind  of  primitive  man  was  perhaps  even 
more  impressed  by  this  irregular  and 
strange  character  than  even  by  the  regular 
cycle  that  underlies  all  the  minor  irregu- 
larities. These  were,  however,  the  occasion 
of  returning  rites  and  ceremonies.  The 
hopes  of  spring  and  the  joys  of  autumn  are 
linked  with  myth  and  story  and  celebrated 
in  religious  dancing  and  feasting.  Then,  also, 
religion  tries  to  control  the  seasons  and  to 
temper  the  heat  of  summer  and  the  cold  of 
winter,  to  induce  rain  to  fall  and  increase  the 
f  ruitfulness  of  the  earth.  In  an  ever-increas- 
ing measure  men  began  to  observe  the  forces 
of  nature  and  to  identify  them  with  the 
divine  power  or  powers  by  which  man  felt 
his  life  surrounded,  and  upon  which,  in  his 
weakness,  he  felt  himself  dependent. 


PRIMITIVE  RELIGION  35 

When,  then,  a  Pantheon  arises  through 
the  amalgamation  of  tribes,  however 
brought  about,  it  is  easy  to  see  how  the 
tribe  of  greatest  strength  should  give  the 
leading  god  in  the  Pantheon.  Nor  is  it 
difficult  to  see  how  the  other  gods  should 
assume  functions  linked  with  the  various 
activities  of  the  other  assimilated  tribes. 
Thus  as  the  Greeks  take  over  Astarte 
from  the  seafaring  Phoenicians,  she  rises 
from  the  sea  and  becomes  with  Poseidon 
one  of  a  cycle  by  which  a  roving  inland 
tribe  recognizes  a  change  in  habit  as  the 
Greeks  become,  in  part  at  least,  a  sea- 
faring people. 

These  vegetative  and  astronomical  cycles 
are  linked  with  man's  earliest  attempts  at 
systematic  knowledge,  for  it  becomes  in- 
cumbent upon  the  tribal  group  to  under- 
stand the  mind  and  will  of  the  powers 
upon  which  it  depends.  Thus  astronomy 
rises  out  of  astrology  and  religious  rites 
attend  all  the  increasingly  complicated  ac- 
tivities of  agriculture.  In  the  most  primi- 
tive mythologies  we  have  history,  philos- 
ophy, and  science  blended  together  in 
rude   unorganized   beginnings.     Science   is 


36  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

man's  experience  organized,  and  systema- 
tized, and  constantly  subjected  to  critical 
tests  to  eliminate  error  in  generalization 
and  to  build  up  farther  hypothetical  postu- 
lates for  the  farther  systematization.  The 
rude  beginnings  of  this  process  are  seen  in 
the  fable,  story,  and  myth  of  early  religion. 
Here,  again,  Hesiod,  Homer,  the  Vedic 
hymns,  and  parts  of  the  Old  Testament 
represent  an  exceedingly  advanced  stage  of 
this  process.  But  in  all  of  these  books  we 
see  the  primitive  material  which  represents 
much  more  simple  strata  of  thought. 
The  most  primitive  cosmogony  is  still  an 
attempt  at  systematic  knowledge.  The 
element  of  wild  speculation  is  overwhelm- 
ing and  observation  is  rude  and  uncritical, 
yet  both  elements  are  there,  and  must 
always  be  present  in  any  attempt  at 
constructive  thinking.  It  may  seem  a 
long  way  from  the  weird  mythologies  that 
cluster  about  the  round  of  spring  and 
autumn  or  the  astronomical  cycle,  to  the 
work  of  Darwin  and  Helmholz,  but  the 
interests  are  not  so  far  apart.  Under  both 
is  the  overwhelming  longing  to  know  and 
to  master  our  world   through   knowledge. 


PRIMITIVE  RELIGION  87 

The  rude  beginnings  of  all  science  are 
found  in  the  attempted  cosmogonies  with 
which  nearly  all  advanced  religions  begin. 

Thus  also  art,  architecture,  music,  the 
dance,  all  bear  the  marks  of  the  religious 
character  of  all  activity  at  a  certain  stage 
of  human  life.  The  temple,  as  the  house 
of  the  god,  gives  the  largest  and  grandest 
forms  which  the  tribal  mind  can  create 
and  furnishes  room  for  development;  and, 
in  turn,  down  to  our  own  day  marks,  as  in 
the  colonial  style,  the  more  imposing  pri- 
vate dwellings.  Music  in  both  its  rhythm 
and  harmony  reflects  in  most  interesting 
details  its  development  from  religious 
chants  and  processional  marches.  The 
slow  beat  of  the  Gregorian  chant  echoes  in 
the  music  dramas  of  Wagner,  while  the 
wild  religious  dances  of  southern  lands  may 
still  in  mystic  sensuousness  be  heard  in 
the  operas  of  Italy.  Nor  is  it  otherwise 
with  painting,  poetry,  and  oratory;  all 
bear  the  traces  of  the  tribal  religious  life 
in  which  they  were  nurtured,  and  to  which 
they  still  minister  even  if  in  other  ways 
and  different  measure. 

That    intelligent    men    should    therefore 


38  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

neglect  the  study  of  the  significance  of 
rehgion,  or  misinterpret  it  in  the  way  so 
often  fashionable,  is  a  bar  to  any  real 
understanding  of  man's  past,  which  has 
been  steeped  in  religious  faiths,  hopes, 
and  fears,  so  far  as  we  can  see,  from  the 
dawn  of  human  intelligence. 


THE  LITERATURE 

Admirable  is  still  Tylor's  "Primitive  Culture." 
Compare  with  this  Frazier's  "Golden  Bough"  and 
Robertson  Smith's  "Religion  of  the  Semites."  See 
also  Morgan's  "Ancient  Society."  In  Herbert 
Spencer's  "Synthetic  Philosophy"  much  data  are 
given,  to  be  used,  however,  with  care.  Collin's 
"Epitome"  is  an  authorized  guide  to  the  phi- 
losophy. For  the  special  study  of  Greek  Religion 
see  Mahaffy's  books,  and  particularly  his  "History 
of  Classical  Literature."  But  especially  consult 
Rhode's  "Psyche"  (German,  1907)  and  his  chapter 
in  the  second  volume  of  "Kleine  Schriften"  on 
"Die  Religion  der  Griechen"  (German,  1902).  Also 
"Kultur  der  Gegenwart"  Teil  I,  Abteilung  viii, 
pages  1  to  290.  For  primitive  mentality,  compare 
Franz  Boaz's  "The  Mind  of  Primitive  Man." 


CHAPTER  III 

The  Twofold  Interest 

It  may  be  assumed  that  the  opinion 
once  widely  popular  that  religions  are  the 
invention  of  power-loving  priests  needs 
no  elaborate  refutation.  The  priest  is,  in 
fact,  a  rather  late  product  of  religious 
organization,  and  reveals  in  his  great  va- 
riety of  character  the  uncertainty  of  his 
origin,  for  religious  organization  is  itself 
late,  and  its  beginnings  are  often  exceed- 
ingly difficult  to  satisfactorily  trace.  The 
early  forms  of  organization  are  tribal  or 
national,  and  any  differentiation  between 
a  natural  group  and  a  religious  group 
may  be  taken  at  once  as  proof  of  an  elabo- 
rate culture  and  an  advanced  life. 

But  there  are  distinctly  two  types  of 
religious  interest  which  mingle  indeed  one 
with  another  in  the  most  strange  com- 
binations, but  are  apparent  the  moment 
religion  emerges  from  the  most  simple  and 
undeveloped  form  to  anything  like  an 
organized  whole. 

39 


40  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

These  two  interests  may  perhaps  best  be 
treated  as  the  priestly  interest  and  the 
prophetic  interest.  However  much  they 
blend  and  mingle,  and  however  diflScult  it 
may  be  from  time  to  time  to  separate 
them  in  a  stream  full  of  eddies  and  cross 
currents,  it  is,  nevertheless,  apparent  in 
any  general  view  that  these  two  interests 
are  not  only  often  quite  distinct,  but  even 
at  times  mutually  hostile. 

Nor  is  it  possible  to  say  that  one  is 
older  or  more  fundamental  than  the  other. 
Both  interests  are  found  present  as  soon  as 
anything  that  can  be  called  religion  at  all 
can  be  observed.  And  both  interests  per- 
sist as  long  as  religion  persists.  The  stage 
of  development  differs,  of  course,  most 
widely.  The  priestly  interest  does  not 
develop  a  priestly  caste  or  even  a  distinct 
priestly  function  until  quite  late.  And 
often  at  all  stages  of  culture  we  find  both 
interests  represented  in  the  activities  of 
one  man  or  set  of  men.  Then,  again,  at 
any  time  one  interest  may  so  dominate  as 
to  almost  entirely  obscure  the  other.  More 
especially  is  this  the  case  when  the  priestly 
interest  has  a  highly  developed   life,   and 


THE  TWOFOLD  INTEREST  41 

finds  that  life  seemingly  threatened  by  the 
fervors  of  the  prophetic  interest.  It  is, 
therefore,  of  very  real  importance  to  get  a 
clear  conception  of  the  two  interests,  and 
to  sympathetically  consider  the  deeper  sig- 
nificance they  possess. 

The  priestly  interest  represents  in  large 
measure  the  continuity  of  the  tribal  re- 
ligious tradition,  or,  indeed,  as  all  tradi- 
tions are  more  or  less  linked  with  religion, 
the  continuity  of  the  tribal  life.  And 
the  historical  importance  of  this  con- 
tinuity needs  no  argument.  The  little 
child  so  long  as  the  cortex  of  the  brain  is 
undevoloped  in  its  texture  is  weary  in 
a  few  minutes  of  any  sustained  activity. 
The  little  one  will  run  all  day  if  healthy 
and  well  fed,  but  a  steady  walk  of  an  hour 
or  two  will  tire  the  undeveloped  child  as 
eight  hours'  running  and  jumping  "on  the 
impulse  of  the  moment"  will  not  do.  The 
undeveloped  man  is  in  some  respects  like 
the  child  at  this  point.  Continuity  and 
fixedness  of  purpose,  the  power  of  steady, 
dogged  following  up  of  a  social  or  tribal 
plan,  is  conspicuously  lacking.  And  here 
the  priestly  interest  in  a  steady  and  con* 


42  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

tinuous  tradition  has  a  social  and  political 
significance  of  the  very  first  character.  It 
is  a  powerfully  cohesive  force  that  not 
only  binds  the  group  together,  but  binds 
generations  to  generations,  thus  giving  sta- 
bility and  rigidity  to  the  group  purpose  as 
it  is  passed  from  one  age  to  another.  This 
is  intensely  interesting  in  its  merely  bio- 
logical effect.  Other  factors  enter  in,  no 
doubt,  but  a  priestly  religious  interest 
has  historically  been  linked  with  the  most 
persistent  group  traditions  we  know.  Thus, 
for  instance,  Judaism,  without  geographical 
boundaries,  without  unity  of  actual  spoken 
dialect,  with  but  doubtful  racial  unity,  has 
survived  on  the  basis  of  a  rigid  priestly 
group  tradition  centering  about  the  syna- 
gogue and  organized  in  the  law  and  the 
commentaries  gathered  about  the  law, 
while  civilizations  that  for  the  moment 
seemed  vastly  more  favorably  situated  for 
survival  have  gone  down  in  the  shocks  of 
struggle  for  existence  and  overlordship. 

The  conservative  function  of  the  priestly 
interest  is  seen  in  the  mass  of  traditions  of 
all  kinds  about  which  it  throws  the  char- 
acter of  "sacredness,"  and  thus  saves  them 


THE  TWOFOLD  INTEREST  43 

amid  the  wandering  miscellaneousness  of  a 
primitive  or  undeveloped  intelligence.  The 
literature  called  the  Talmud  represents  on 
a  very  high  plane  what  on  much  lower 
levels  of  intelligence  and  culture  the  priestly 
interest  is  constantly  doing.  Thus  in 
Egypt  and  Babylon  rise  great  priestly 
states  on  the  basis  of  a  group  tradition 
that  conserves  the  life  and  fixes  the  pur- 
pose of  the  tribe  or  nation.  Thus  also  in 
China  the  priestly  religious  interest  throws 
about  the  family  and  the  ancestral  mem- 
ory a  sacredness  that  renders  the  life  rigid 
and  tenacious  to  an  extent  still  the  marvel 
of  every  observer. 

One  of  the  obvious  effects  of  this  priestly 
interest  is  an  element  of  order  and  sequence 
which  it  brings  into  the  life.  Life  is  sur- 
rounded by  ritual  and  cult.  The  wander- 
ing attention  is  trained  to  greater  automatic 
precision.  The  destructive  individualisms 
of  an  immature  group  life  are  controlled  by 
the  bonds  of  an  inherited  order,  and  when 
family  discipline  in  the  narrower  sense 
ceases  the  group  tradition  takes  up  the 
task  of  ordering  the  individual  life.  This 
process  has  many  sides,  but  no  one  aspect 


44  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

is  of  greater  importance  than  the  religious 
priestly  tradition.  So,  for  instance,  nearly 
all  that  is  highest  and  noblest  in  Greek  art 
was  worked  out  under  the  influence  of  a 
religious  tradition  that  handed  down  as 
* 'sacred"  the  body  of  experience  gained  in 
Egypt  and  in  Crete  during  the  long  periods 
of  the  Minoan  and  Mycenaean  ages.  No 
other  interest  has  had  anything  like  the 
conserving  force  of  this  priestly  interest. 
It  is,  of  course,  often  uncritical,  but  the 
experiences  thus  uncritically  conserved  form 
in  nearly  every  instance  the  groundwork 
upon  which  historical  science  must  build. 
Practically  all  primitive  traditions  are  re- 
ligious traditions,  and  practically  all  primi- 
tive literature  and  all  early  documents 
have  been  conserved  to  us  by  the  priestly 
religious  interest. 

Moreover,  the  ordering  of  the  rhythm  of 
the  personal  and  group  life  has  been  largely 
the  work  of  this  priestly  religious  interest. 
In  the  animal  stage  of  life  this  rhythm  is 
controlled  by  the  outward  forces  of  nature. 
Spring  and  summer,  autumn  and  winter 
determine  together  with  night  and  day  the 
main  rhythms  of  the  less  developed  crea- 


THE  TWOFOLD  INTEREST  45 

tures.  As  man  advances  in  his  mastery 
over  the  forces  of  nature  he  is  exposed  to 
dangers  of  irregularity  and  excess  which 
are  impossible  to  animals  in  the  bonds  of 
external  forces.  He  can  warm  himself  in 
winter  and  preserve  food;  he  can  light  the 
night  and  greatly  extend  his  area  of  wan- 
dering. It  was  therefore  a  service  of  first- 
rate  importance  when  the  priestly  reli- 
gious tradition  flung  over  the  rhythm  of 
the  personal  life  the  character  of  "sacred- 
ness"  and  began  to  control  the  life  by 
giving  it  internal  motives  to  regularity. 
Thus  puberty,  marriage,  childbirth,  ad- 
vancement in  rank,  and  funeral  rites,  all 
are  ordered  by  the  religious  tradition  and 
surrounded  by  cult  acts  expressive  of  this 
sacredness.  And  even  the  day  is  divided 
by  hours  of  prayer,  by  sacrificial  prayers 
at  meals,  and  by  religious  interruptions  of 
one  kind  and  another.  In  nones  and  ves- 
pers, the  Mohammedan  calls  to  prayers, 
the  evangelical  family  prayers  and  grace 
before  meat,  as  well  as  the  Sundays  and 
Sabbaths  with  their  ordered  religious  ex- 
ercises, we  see  this  priestly  instinct  still 
striving  to  introduce,  often  to  its  great  ad- 


46  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

vantage,  a  routine  and  steadiness  into  life. 
And  this  order  and  routine  it  stamps  with 
its  sacredness  and  thus  gives  it  a  place  no 
other  motive  has  been  strong  enough  to 
give  it  in  the  life  of  the  individual. 

The  same  influence  orders  the  life  of  the 
group.  Festivals  and  religious  days,  cere- 
monial repetitions  all  divide  and  control 
the  primitive  group  life,  and  give  it  in  cult 
and  ritual  the  steadiness  of  outward  regu- 
lation maintained  by  inner  motives  of 
assent. 

The  misapprehension  is  widespread  that 
religion  is  the  child  of  fear.  It  is  no  more 
the  child  of  fear  than  the  child  of  joy. 
Fear  has  its  place.  The  gods  of  other 
groups  are  feared  and  hated.  But  the  god 
of  the  group  is  a  protector  and  friend. 
The  religion  of  early  mankind  is  full  of  joy 
and  feasting.  Dancing,  music,  and  elabo- 
rate decoration  express  the  joyous  excite- 
ment of  special  religious  occasions.  Even 
the  worship  of  Astarte  and  Aphrodite,  that 
seems  to  us  in  many  ways  revolting  and 
irreligious,  was  originally  the  consecration 
to  religion  of  the  highest  joy  of  the  senses 
which  man  could  feel.     The  mingling  of 


THE  TWOFOLD  INTEREST  47 

fear  with  reverence  and  worship  is  natural, 
but  it  is,  on  the  other  hand,  quite  re- 
markable how  religious  joy  is  the  marked 
feature  of  so  much  primitive  religious  life. 
All  the  earlier  Jewish  feasts  were  ones  of 
joy  and  triumph.  Christmas,  Easter,  and 
the  harvest  festivals  have  their  place  in 
analogous  customs  in  all  primitive  reli- 
gions, and  are  all  feasts  of  joy  and 
thanksgiving. 

It  is  also  exceedingly  important  to  study 
the  place  the  priestly  religious  tradition  has 
in  the  educational  system.  Down  to  our 
own  day  the  character  of  "sacredness"  has 
never  been  wholly  taken  away  from  edu- 
cation. The  Mohammedan  university  is 
still  a  religious  school.  The  Jewish  edu- 
cation is  still  linked  with  the  synagogue 
and  sacred  books.  The  modern  university 
has  all  manner  of  reminders  still  of  its 
former  character  as  a  place  where  the 
priestly  tradition  raised  up  priestly  leaders 
and  studied  and  organized  the  cult  and  the 
religious  ritual  of  the  group  life. 

Primitive  education  consisted  largely  in 
the  preparation  for  and  initiation  into 
the  separate  activities  of  life.     To  this  day 


48  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

education  ends  in  some  climax,  "gradua- 
tion," or  "degree."  In  all  the  initiation 
ceremonies  the  priestly  religious  tradition 
is  present,  imparting  sacredness  to  the 
process  and  heightening  its  significance  by 
its  recognition.  The  earliest  documents 
are  directly  the  work  of  priests,  the  earliest 
writings  are  the  "hieroglyphic"  or  priestly 
writings,  and  far  down  into  the  Middle 
Ages  of  our  own  era  the  only  ones  who 
could  write  were  the  "clerics."  WTien, 
therefore,  anyone  wanted  to  learn,  he  had 
to  go  to  the  priestly  tradition  for  instruc- 
tion, and  generally  in  some  way  gain  its 
recognition  before  being  generally  con- 
sidered as  being  "learned."  This  wonderful 
social  service  of  the  priestly  religious  tradi- 
tion is  now  often  ignored  or  misrepresented, 
because  at  a  certain  stage  priestly  con- 
servatism may  lead  to  the  hardening  of  the 
tradition  into  a  lifeless  form,  thus  inter- 
fering with  intellectual  progress.  But  the 
fact  that  the  priestly  interest  over- 
functions  should  not  blind  us  to  the  fact 
that  to  it  we  owe  the  conservation  of 
nearly  all  our  educational  traditions.  It 
has    conserved    many    useless    and    even 


THE  TWOFOLD  INTEREST  49 

harmful  things,  but  without  it  we  should 
have  had  very  little  to  conserve.  This 
priestly  interest  in  education  has  often 
degenerated  into  a  selfish  and  obstructive 
ecclesiasticism;  at  the  same  time  it  is 
exceedingly  ill-informed  and  unsympathetic 
criticism  that  cannot  distinguish  between 
the  two  elements  in  the  historical  de- 
velopment. 

The  conservation  of  man's  slow  ac- 
quirements from  generation  to  generation, 
the  gradual  formation  of  a  code  of  morals, 
the  transmission  of  noble  and  refining  tra- 
ditions, the  stern  suppression  of  unsocial 
individualism  has  been  the  function  almost 
wholly  of  this  priestly  interest  in  the  past, 
flinging  the  mantle  of  sacredness  over  the 
group  life  in  its  more  stable  forms.  It  is 
true  that  on  low  levels  of  culture  etiquette, 
that  is,  the  ceremonial,  relationships  quite 
apart  from  any  inward  moral  attitude  form 
the  main  interest.  Outward  correctness  is 
the  leading  emphasis,  and  with  minute 
care  the  priestly  interest  seeks  to  establish 
and  maintain  outward  conformity  to  the 
body  of  teachings  which  is  passed  down 
from  generation  to  generation. 


50  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

This  body  of  etiquette  is  older  than  any 
systematic  formulation  of  ethics.  Only  later 
does  the  moral  attitude  arise  out  of  these 
ceremonial  conformities,  and  though  the 
conceptions  of  "ought"  and  "ought  not" 
have  baffled  us  in  final  analysis,  it  is  easy 
to  see  that  morality  arose  on  the  basis  of 
priestly  prohibitions.  This  or  that  was 
taboo,  and  the  categorical  imperative  was  in 
its  earliest  form  a  strong  "Thou  shalt  not!" 

The  child  not  only  has  no  organized 
system  of  inhibitions,  it  has  almost  no 
place  for  inward  inhibitions.  These  must 
come  first  from  without.  "Don't  do  that!" 
is  the  constant  cry  to  the  growing  little 
one.  By  investing  these  inhibitions  T^dth 
sacredness  the  priestly  interest  tends  stead- 
ily to  render  the  life  of  child  or  group 
autonomous.  The  inhibition  becomes  an 
inward  one,  the  recoil  from  certain  lines  of 
conduct  becomes  a  second  nature. 

It  is  true  that  it  is  a  superficial  analysis 
that  jumps  from  these  "habits"  to  moral- 
ity, as  though  from  unmoral  habits 
morality  must  proceed.  At  the  same  time 
we  have,  undoubtedly,  the  basis  for  the 
outward  foundation  of  morality,   and  fail 


THE  TWOFOLD  INTEREST  51 

only  to  be  able  to  satisfactorily  trace  the 
moral  will  to  the  unmoral  mechanism. 
Thus,  to  borrow  a  term  from  another 
science,  the  priestly  interest  represents  the 
anabolic^  element  in  the  group  life.  And 
herein  lies  its  danger  when  in  the  group 
life  this  priestly  interest  overf unctions. 

And  this  overfunctioning  is,  unfortu- 
nately, a  common  phenomenon.  By  ne- 
cessity the  priestly  function  is  exercised  by 
those  with  some  claim  to  authority.  The 
father  or  the  mother,  the  older  son  or  the 
clever  and  retentive  mind  within  the  group 
becomes  established  as  the  traditional 
source  of  religious  authority.  The  func- 
tion of  such  authority,  being  mainly  to 
conserve  the  past,  becomes  sacro-sanct. 
All  innovation  becomes  easily  an  attack 
upon  the  sacredness  of  the  tribal  life. 
Conservation  becomes  the  end  rather  than 
a  means  to  an  end,  and  a  deathlike  rigidity 
may  take  the  place  of  life  and  movement. 
Examples   are   seen   in   China   and  Egypt 


'The  physiologist  speaks  of  the  metabolia  of  the  cell  with  its  two  as- 
pects, that  of  catabilis,  or  breaking  down  of  the  cell  tissue,  and  the  build- 
ing up,  or  anabolic  conserving  process  due  to  the  blood  flow.  Compare 
Professor  Max  Verworn's  article,  "Physiology,"  in  the  Encyclopsedia 
Britannica,    eleventh  edition. 


52  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

and   in  the  Levitical   development  of  the 
Old  Testament. 

Moreover,  the  attention  is  mainly  ar- 
rested by  the  outward  and  the  formal. 
Outward  conformity  is  more  demanded 
than  any  inward  life,  and  thus  the  priestly 
interest  values  detail  and  minute  con- 
formity as  evidences  of  real  religious  in- 
terest, and  legalism  and  formalism  soon 
curse  the  whole  religiosity  fostered  by  the 
priestly  interest  when  left  unbalanced.  To 
maintain  this  conformity  authority  is 
needed,  and  the  priestly  interest  grasps 
easily  after  power,  and  readily  becomes  an 
autocratic  and  aristocratic  leadership.  Or, 
to  maintain  the  old  ways  and  traditions,  it 
is  wont  to  court  the  forces  that  have  also 
an  interest  in  the  maintenance  of  the 
status  quo;  thus  it  becomes,  not  only 
tyrannical,  but,  alas,  often  the  protector 
of  tyranny  under  the  guise  of  religious 
conservatism,  and  with  an  honest  interest 
simply  in  the  maintenance  of  things  as 
they  are.  Practically  all  developed  priest- 
hoods, wherever  they  are  found,  whether 
in  primitive  religion  or  in  modern  Protes- 
tantism,   are    toiy    and    reactionary,    for 


THE  TWOFOLD  INTEREST  53 

conservation  has  been  the  function  of  the 
priestly  interest  so  long  that  it  almost 
inevitably  overfunctions,  and  thus  brings 
upon  religion  the  reproach  of  being  non- 
progressive and  antagonistic  to  new  cur- 
rents of  feeling,  thought,  and  action. 

For  the  same  reason  the  priestly  interest 
is  nearly  always  afraid.  It  is  forever  timid 
in  the  midst  of  life's  unceasing  change. 
Rightly  it  sees  that  mere  change  is  not 
always  for  the  better,  and  readily  it  be- 
lieves that  therefore  all  change  is  for  the 
worse.  It  clings  with  at  times  pathetic 
and  at  times  provoking  tenacity  to  quite 
unimportant  and  long-lost  positions,  and 
every  new  movement  in  the  world's  life 
seems  dangerous  just  because  it  is  new. 

The  dangers  that  beset  its  ethics  are 
formality,  externality,  and  narrowness  of 
vision.  Large  interests  are  overborne  by 
small  but  intense  affections  for  detail. 
Stagnation  and  hypocrisy  are  the  constant 
reproaches  that  may  be  brought  against 
it.  And  as  these  things  flourish  in  the  last 
stages  of  any  era  dominated  by  an  or- 
ganized priestly  interest,  the  real  services 
of  the  past — its  great  organizing  power,  its 


54  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

faithful  conservation  of  great  traditions, 
its  leadership  in  education,  and  its  advo- 
cacy of  order  and  morality — are  apt  to  be 
forgotten  in  the  impatience  and  anger  with 
which  at  last  it  is  almost  sure  to  be  swept 
away  by  a  tide  of  life  it  is  too  weak  to 
withstand  and  too  old  and  senile  to  enter 
upon  anew. 

True  it  is  that  the  priestly  interest  is 
likely  to  be  formulated  in  a  caste  in  only 
late  periods  of  culture,  though  sometimes  it 
exists  very  strongly  entrenched  but  with  a 
comparatively  weak  development  of  the 
priest  as  such,  as  we  see  in  China.  Again, 
it  may  become  so  identified  with  a  trium- 
phant ruling  class,  as  in  India,  that  the 
distinctively  religious  interest  is  almost 
forgotten.  And  everywhere  it  has  to  con- 
tend, not  only  with  the  forces  of  dis- 
integration, but  also  with  those  of  progress, 
and  it  is  itself  subject  to  great  divisions 
because  it  is  so  difficult  to  hold  traditions 
unchanged,  and  yet  each  difference  is  likely 
to  call  out  the  priestly  zeal  to  its  special 
maintenance. 

When  also  this  interest  does  form  a 
caste  it  is  likely  to  be  arrogant  and  mas- 


THE  TWOFOLD  INTEREST  55 

terful  to  the  point  of  the  loss  of  all  really 
religious  influence,  because  it  asserts  itself 
in  the  place  of  the  gods,  and  then  no 
trickery  or  imposture  has  been  too  base  to 
maintain  the  caste.  Hence  priestly  trick- 
ery disgraces  the  religious  development  of 
nearly  all  lands  where  it  has  successfully 
grasped  after  power,  and  the  feeling  that 
the  end  justifies  the  means,  and  that  evil 
may  be  done  that  good  may  come,  has 
often  clouded  the  services  of  this  type  of 
religious  leadership. 


THE  LITERATURE 

For  the  literature  here  see  the  general  literature 
dealing  with  the  priestly  and  prophetic  elements 
in  the  Old  Testament,  as,  for  instance.  Driver's 
"Introduction  to  the  Old  Testament,"  or  Cornill's 
"The  Prophets  of  the  Old  Testament."  Compare 
also  Kuenen's  "National  ReUgion  and  World  Re- 
Ugion."  See  also  the  articles  in  the  Encyclopedia 
Biblica,  and  in  Hastings's  Bible  Dictionary  on 
"Prophet"  and  "Priest."  For  criticism,  see  the 
really  unbalanced  attack  by  Draper  in  his  "History 
of  the  Conflict  between  Religion  and  Science"  and 
the  far  saner  book  by  Andrew  D.  White,  "The 
Warfare  of  Science  with  Theology  in  Christendom." 
Compare  also  the  altitude  of  Herbert  Spencer. 


CHAPTER  IV 

The  Prophetic  Interest 

As  far  back  as  we  can  go  we  find  linked 
with  the  priestly  interest  another  and 
different  spirit  in  the  religious  leadership 
of  the  race.  Like  the  priestly  interest,  it 
is  rather  in  the  beginning  an  emphasis  in 
the  religious  life  than  an  interest  apart. 
Moreover,  it  is  even  less  likely  than  the 
priestly  interest  to  formulate  itself  in  a 
class  or  caste.  Its  history  leads  us  back 
into  the  same  world  of  undifferentiated 
groping  after  the  meaning  of  life  and 
death.  For  convenience  we  call  this  in- 
terest the  prophetic  type.  The  beginnings 
are  very  lowly.  Fundamentally,  it  is 
rooted  in  the  faith  men  have  in  the  ab- 
normal insight  of  specially  gifted  fellow 
men.  This  prophetic  insight  in  later  stages 
may  be  heightened  or  superinduced  by 
various  means;  and  these  means  link  its 
life  at  several  points  to  the  priestly  in- 
terest. Nevertheless,  it  is  often  at  odds 
with  the  more  static  priestly  leadership. 

56 


THE  PROPHETIC  INTEREST         57 

Drugs,  dances,  music,  and  all  the  primi- 
tive approaches  to  hypnotism  and  auto- 
suggestion play  at  one  stage  or  another  a 
marked  role  in  the  prophetic  type  of  re- 
ligious development.  Thus  it  happens 
that  so  far  as  these  things  are  under  the 
control  of  the  priestly  interest  the  pro- 
phetic is  often  merged  in  the  priestly  or 
springs  out  of  it. 

Thus  the  prophet  of  the  Old  Testa- 
ment in  the  early  stages  is  a  dancing 
dervish,  who  dances  before  the  ark,  and 
the  "priests"  of  Baal  dance,  cry,  and  cut 
themselves  with  knives  in  the  effort 
to  control  divinity.  Soon,  however,  the 
exceptional  and  abnormal  character  of 
the  prophet  separates  him  from  the  priestly 
interest,  and,  to  again  borrow  a  phrase 
from  another  science,  his  catabolic  ten- 
dency reveals  itself.  For  the  prophetic 
interest  is  apt  to  be  intensely  individual. 
The  superior  insight  makes  the  prophet  a 
being  apart.  He  is  to  some  degree  normally 
at  war  with  the  existing  situation,  and  sees 
beyond  the  present  to  the  next  step  to  be 
taken.  So  that  even  when  he  proclaims 
the  past  as  an  ideal  to  be  regained,  it  is  an 


58  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

idealized  past  and  is  in  reality  a  new  and 
unexperienced  situation. 

The  priestly  and  prophetic  interests  may 
be  emphases  in  the  same  human  life,  or 
even  in  religious  classes  and  castes,  but 
the  prophetic  interest  is  then  almost  sure 
to  be  swallowed  up  in  the  more  conserva- 
tive and  static  life.  The  monastic  de- 
velopment has  always  been  essentially  pro- 
phetic in  its  origin,  but  soon  passes  from 
this  progressive  and  critical  stage  to  ac- 
ceptance of  what  is  substantially  a  priestly 
routine  and  sinks  to  the  level  of  the  static 
priestliness. 

The  great  services  of  the  prophet  lie 
along  the  line  of  his  religious  genius.  He 
it  is  that  formulates  the  new  message,  and 
when  it  has  been  accepted  and  become  the 
rule  of  the  group  it  is  generally  forgotten 
how  novel  the  message  was.  Confucius  was 
essentially  a  prophet,  but  Confucianism  has 
become  to  the  last  degree  priestly. 

His  function  is,  however,  in  the  first 
instance  disruptive.  He  is  independent  and 
aggressive.  Thus  he  is  always  hailed  as  a 
destroyer  of  religion,  and,  like  Socrates  or 
Jesus,  denounced  by  the  established  priest- 


THE  PROPHETIC  INTEREST         59 

liness  as  a  corrupter  of  the  people,  and 
more  particularly  of  the  young;  for  to 
them  the  prophet  surely  turns.  The  ex- 
pert, whether  in  music  or  religion  or  in 
art,  is  constantly  bringing  everything  to 
the  judgment  bar  of  his  formulated  expert 
knowledge.  The  new  message  does  not  fit 
his  rules,  and  so  must  be  wrong,  and  he  is 
tone-deaf  to  it  or  hardly  listens.  So  to  the 
young  and  the  common  people,  whose  very 
ignorance  protects  them  from  these  expert 
prejudices,  the  prophet  has  generally  to 
turn.  It  is  not  simply  the  Beckmessers  and 
the  pedants  who  are  among  the  prophet's 
critics;  the  wise  and  balanced  fear  the  new 
because  they  have  seen  so  much  cheap 
falseness  parade  as  new  redemption.  The 
stability  of  the  group,  and  the  need  for 
definite  starting-points  for  any  inquiry, 
makes  the  experienced  man  overcautious 
and  even  timid. 

And  false  prophets  are  quite  as  common 
as  dead  priests.  The  danger  lies  on  the 
surface.  By  the  very  nature  of  his  func- 
tion the  prophet  is  exposed  to  all  sorts  of 
shipwreck.  The  vision  that  gives  him  his 
power  is  so  vivid  and  so  novel  that  all  the 


60  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

present  is  dark  and  under  condemnation. 
The  prophet  is  critical  and  destructive,  and 
generally  indiscriminate  and  onesided.  He 
almost  compels  opposition,  and  then  is 
driven  by  the  opposition  into  still  more 
marked  onesidedness.  His  general  estimate 
of  both  the  past  and  the  present  is  un- 
historical.  He  is  apt  to  idealize  the  past 
and  see  the  present  only  in  darkest  colors. 
This  unhistorical  attitude  leads  to  an  under- 
valuation of  discriminating  history,  and  he 
would  destroy  the  present  institution  to 
make  way  for  the  new  construction.  His 
experience  is  so  vivid,  his  vision  so  clear, 
that  he  forgets  that  outsiders  seek,  and 
ought  to  seek,  some  way  of  judging  of  the 
vision  and  correcting  the  results  by  other 
experiences. 

To  all  these  must  be  added  the  fact  that 
the  prophetic  aspect  in  the  history  of  re- 
ligion has  been  linked  with  genius  and 
insanity,  and  that  often  only  the  future 
can  decide  whether  the  claims  of  genius 
are  divine  egotism  or  blank  insanity.  This 
is  true  of  the  prophetic  messages  in  art,  in 
music,  or  in  literature.  A  humble  unself- 
conscious  prophet  is  well-nigh  a  psj^chologi- 


THE  PROPHETIC  INTEREST         61 

cal  impossibility,  and  sometimes  even  his- 
tory has  difficulty  in  deciding  whether  a 
Swedenborg  and  a  Nietzsche  are  prophets 
or  insane,  and  in  rightly  estimating  the  line 
where  genius  ends  and  insanity  begins. 

The  prophet  may  gather  about  him 
groups  of  followers,  and  soon  his  vision 
may  be  translated  by  others  into  organi- 
zations, but  he  himself  is  likely  to  be  an 
intense  and  somewhat  lonely  individualist; 
and  the  supreme  prophet  must  dwell  much 
apart.  His  very  function  is  the  revelation 
of  a  new  individuality,  and  the  exhibition 
of  a  new  and  startling  personality  at  its 
best  and  highest.  He  has  to  train  first  a 
group  and  then  a  generation  to  understand 
him.  So  much  alone  is  he  that  even  his 
nearest  followers  misjudge  and  misinter- 
pret him.  Francis  of  Assisi  had  hardly 
gone  to  his  grave  before  all  he  really  stood 
for  was  denied  in  his  name  by  those  he 
had  himself  trained.  Thus  it  happens 
that  every  great  movement,  so  far  as  it 
has  had  the  personal  element  in  it,  results 
in  a  second  growth  which  seems  almost 
like  a  caricature.  The  Reformation  was 
succeeded    by    a    theology    that    bore    its 


62  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

name,  but  had  neither  the  Reformation 
spirit  nor  its  life.  Indeed,  the  supreme 
prophet  can  never  be  wholly  expressed  in 
any  relatively  static  and  priestly  organiza- 
tion. Jesus  Christ  is  more  than  Chris- 
tianity, Luther  better  worth  while  than 
Lutheranism.  Buddha  still  outtops  Bud- 
dhism. For  the  prophet  is  a  revealer  and 
the  organization  conserves  as  best  it  may 
but  the  remembrance  of  the  revelation. 

At  the  same  time  we  would  know  noth- 
ing to  speak  of  concerning  the  prophet  if 
the  revelation  were  not  dynamic  in  an  or- 
ganization. Thus  the  two  emphases  in  the 
religious  life  complete  each  other,  and  are 
never  wholly  separate.  Both  must  take 
their  place  in  the  lifting  of  life  into  real 
sacredness,  and  flinging  about  the  ex- 
periences of  time  the  mantle  of  eternity. 
Nay,  in  all  religious  life  both  elements 
should  normally  have  a  place.  He  who 
has  never  known  the  emotional,  uplifting 
power  of  a  new  religious  experience  can 
hardly  have  really  put  his  religious  life  to 
any  test.  From  time  to  time  even  the 
humblest  and  most  obscure  of  those  of  us 
who    make   no    claims    to    aught    but   the 


THE  PROPHETIC  INTEREST         63 

average  human  experience  have  had  special 
approaches  to  the  infinite  mystery,  and 
have  felt  the  new  power  of  special  insight 
into  duty,  and  far  promise  of  things  good. 

Yet  while  this  is  so,  the  greater  part  of 
our  religious  life  must  be  spent  in  the 
simple,  helpful  routine  of  priestly  refresh- 
ment and  instruction.  We  go  over  the 
same  things  that  helped  us  before;  we 
engage  with  our  fellows  in  the  routine  of 
religious  exercise  and  find  comfort  and 
pleasure  in  it  as  we  find  comfort  and  joy 
in  the  rest  of  the  familiar  routine  of  life. 
How  good  and  refreshing  is  the  familiar 
simplicity  and  even  dullness  of  home  life 
after  the  novelty  and  excitement  of  a 
fascinating  journey!  We  could  never  really 
endure  a  life  in  tents  with  Jesus  on  the 
Mount  of  Transfiguration.  We  must  go 
down  from  it  to  find  the  light  of  common 
day,  amid  the  other  stupid  followers  and 
captious  critics  of  the  Master.  There  is 
comfort  in  finding  our  own  ordinary,  com- 
monplace level,  even  after  a  prophet  has 
taken  us  up  into  the  vision.  We  cannot 
live  by  visions  alone;  they  must  be  trans- 
formed into  the  sober  realities  of  everyday 


64  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

life,  and  that  life  must  incarnate  the  vision 
if  we  are  not  to  be  constantly  betrayed  by 
a  fata  morgana  that  entices  us  away  from 
all  reality  to  find  ourselves  at  last  lost 
amid  the  bitter  disappointments  of  the 
mirage. 

No  task  is  more  delicate  than  that  of 
trying  the  spirits  whether  they  be  of  God 
or  no.  Temperament,  training,  self-interest, 
inertia,  restlessness,  conceit  are  predispos- 
ing causes  to  many  false  judgments,  and 
once  we  have  committed  ourselves  to  the 
wrong  side  it  generally  takes  some  vision 
on  the  way  to  Damascus  to  break  through 
the  blind,  obstinate  zeal  and  reach  the 
better  manhood. 

Nor  can  we  wholly  trust  the  guides  to 
whom  we  naturally  turn.  Institutional  re- 
ligion has  been  too  often  mistaken  to  take 
the  judgments  of  our  natural  mentors 
without  examination.  Institutional  reli- 
gion rejected  Wesley,  Calvin,  Luther,  Sa- 
vonarola, not  to  speak  of  Paul  and  Jesus. 
Nevertheless,  many  false  prophets  are  gone 
out  into  the  world,  and  keep  saying,  "Lo, 
here!"  or  "Lo,  there!"  Our  mistakes  have 
sometimes  an  intellectual  reason — we  sim- 


THE  PROPHETIC  INTEREST         65 

ply  lacked  clear  vision.  Sometimes  they 
rest  upon  emotional  or  aesthetic  misjudg- 
ments — we  have  been  unable  to  weigh 
rightly  the  elements  of  taste  and  propor- 
tion. But  the  dangerous  grounds  for  our 
failures  to  hear  the  Divine  voice  amid  the 
confusions  and  Babel  of  sounds  are  our 
moral  limitations.  We  are  selfishly  in- 
terested in  some  way  in  the  maintenance 
of  the  old,  and  summon  to  our  aid  all  the 
arguments  we  can  gather  to  refute  the 
prophet  and  drive  him  out  of  the  religious 
or  other  circle  in  which  he  demands  a 
hearing. 

The  final  test  is,  of  course,  the  outcome 
in  life.  By  their  fruits  we  shall  know 
them;  but  only  exceedingly  open-eyed  and 
generous  minds  can  save  us  in  the  day 
when  the  prophet  comes  to  our  Bethel  and 
points  us  to  a  better  and  nobler  way. 


THE  LITERATURE 

The  study  of  prophetism  can  best  be  carried  on 
in  connection  with  the  Old  Testament,  where  it 
reached  its  highest  organized  point.  Consult  the 
volume  in  Kent's  "Students'  Old  Testament"  deal- 


66  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

ing  with  the  prophets  and  their  WTitings,  Compare 
also  the  articles  before  mentioned  on  "Prophet"  in 
the  "Encyclopaedia  Biblica"  and  in  Hastings's 
"Bible  Dictionary."  Compare  also  C.  H.  Cornill's 
"Der  israelitische  Prophetismus"  (3d  Edition,  Ger- 
man and  English  translation).  Also  the  sections 
on  "Prophetism"  in  H.  P.  Smith's  "Old  Testa- 
ment History." 


CHAPTER  V 

Creative  Ide.\lism  and  Life 

The  dispute   between   determinism  and 

free  will  depends  upon  the  assumption  that 

a   point    of    view    mentally    necessary   for 

certain  purposes  can  be  therefore  asserted 

as  universally  true.     Whether  we  admit  it 

or  not,  we  are  all  determinists  when  we 

set  out  to  know,  because  to  know  means 

the  mastery  of  the  conditions  that  resulted 

in  the  event  we  are  investigating.    That  is 

to  say,  we  really  know  anything  only  when 

we  know   it  in  its  conditioning  relations. 

We  do  "know"  when  we  have  discovered 

and   exhaustively  examined  the  conditions 

under    which    any    event    happened    and 

would  happen  again  if  the  conditions  were 

reproduced.     Our  mastery  over  the  world 

and   life   is   made   possible,    so   far   as   we 

possess  it,  by  knowledge  of  the  conditions 

which  determine  all  activity  and  conduct. 

There  are  no  single  conditions,  and  there 

are    no    single    results,    so    that    when    we 

even  speak  of  the  "main  cause"  we  really 

67 


68  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

only  mean  main  cause  from  our  point  of 
view,  because  if  anything  is  a  condition  at 
all,  it  is  a  necessary  condition.  If  a  man  is 
killed  on  the  street,  the  doctor  says  the 
"reason"  he  died  was  a  fracture  of  the 
skull,  the  coroner's  jury  says  the  "reason" 
he  died  was  because  a  person  unknown 
struck  him.  The  friends  say  the  "cause"  of 
his  death  was  the  lawless  character  of  the 
town.  The  murderer  says  in  his  heart, 
"The  ^reason'  I  killed  him  was  my  wanting 
his  money." 

In  the  enormous  complexity  of  life  only 
very  simple  happenings  can  be  even  rela- 
tively reproduced.  Even  our  finest  science 
is  but  a  rude  instrument.  The  trained  tea 
taster  can  with  his  tongue  detect  differences 
no  chemistry  can  establish,  and  when  we 
rise  in  the  complexities  of  questions  of 
taste  no  instruments  of  precision  can  do 
anything  more  than  give  us  data  for  our 
personal  judgments  and  decisions.  We 
seek  the  "causes"  or  conditions  and  weigh 
them  according  to  our  main  purpose. 

Moreover,  the  world  we  live  in  is  each 
day  and  each  hour  a  new  world.  Evolu- 
tion has  to  be  taken  seriously;  and  when 


CREATIVE  IDEALISM  69 

we  do  so  take  it  we  realize  that  it  is  a 
growing  world  and  that  growth  means 
novelty.  Whatever  life  is  as  a  form  of 
energy,  it  is  certainly  the  transformation 
process  by  which  in  the  breaking  down  of 
special  forms  other  and  even  more  highly 
specialized  forms  result.  These  are  new. 
Moreover,  our  knowledge,  resting  as  it 
does  upon  experience  (compare  page  12), 
has  as  one  of  its  most  fundamental  ex- 
periences that  of  our  own  creative  activity 
in  the  world  process.  Of  course  this  may 
be  a  delusion;  but  if  so,  then  all  experience 
may  be  delusion.  It  is  open  to  the  Indian 
metaphysician  to  maintain  this  attitude, 
but  we  are  constantly  reestablishing 
our  faith  in  this  creative  efficiency  by 
actually  making  the  world  we  live  in.  And 
no  man  is  so  caught  in  the  superficial 
fallacy  of  a  mechanical  determinism  that  he 
really  can  treat  himself  and  other  men  as 
superior  kinds  of  elaborate  machines  wholly 
conditioned  by  the  ponderable  elements  of 
life. 

Now,  among  the  most  evident  conditions 
upon  which  the  new  world  we  will  live  in 
to-morrow   will   depend   are  the  ideals   of 


70  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

to-day.  These  have  a  history.  They  are 
not  ex  nihilo,  but  they  are  again  condi- 
tioned by  our  own  activity.  We  "praise" 
or  "blame"  the  creative  element  in  the 
personality  that  is  an  essential  element  in 
any  idealism,  and  no  analysis  can  be  so 
keen  as  to  trace  the  exact  share  the  ideal 
has  had  in  the  world  process,  or  to  isolate 
from  the  ideal  conditions  out  of  which  a 
creative  ideal  sprang  the  essential  novelty. 
Yet  it  is  patently  there.  Wagner  did  not 
create  ex  nihilo  his  symphonic  harmonies, 
but  it  is  a  different  world  since  Wagner 
created  "Siegfried,"  and  the  glory  of  Ra- 
phael's Madonna  can  never  be  dissolved 
into  photographic  reproductions  of  living 
people  and  a  scale  of  color  learned  from 
Perugino.  He  has  created  an  indefinable 
something  that  has  made  the  whole  world 
of  pictorial  art  new.  Great  creative  per- 
sonalities of  this  kind  are,  however,  only 
typical  and  illustrative  of  our  own  more 
common  experiences.  The  world  we  five 
in  is  not  made  up  simply  of  the  elements 
we  find;  it  is  made  of  the  us  and  the  ele- 
ments we  find.  In  fact,  our  real  life  con- 
sists in  the  clothing  our  ideals  with  what 


CREATIVE  IDEALISM  71 

we  call  material  fact.  And  the  real  differ- 
ence between  daydreams  and  ideals  con- 
sists in  this  creative  character.  That  this 
creative  character  is  within  limits  goes 
without  saying.  Our  increasing  mastery 
over  our  environment,  and  our  increasing 
understanding  of  the  part  we  are  called 
upon  to  play,  never  lifts  us  out  of  the 
conditions  under  which  alone  our  activity 
has  any  meaning.  Nay,  our  whole  mastery 
over  the  external  world  depends  upon  our 
knowledge  of  its  conditional  existence  and 
our  own  realization  of  our  conditioned 
mental  life.  This,  however,  not  only  does 
not  make  the  picture  of  a  complicated,  well- 
oiled,  and  well-cared-for  engine  an  ade- 
quate symbol  of  our  life,  but  it  excludes  it. 
The  engine  maker  has  clothed  his  ideal,  as 
nearly  as  he  may,  in  steel  and  copper  and 
iron,  but  he  has  not  implanted  in  it  his  own 
creative  idealism. 

Religion  has  invested  this  creative  ideal- 
ism in  all  ages  with  peculiar  sacredness. 
The  ideals  of  the  individual  and  the  ideals 
of  a  group  are  the  really  essential  facts  in 
human  life,  and  religion  has  always  re- 
garded the  ideal  as  the  place  where  the 


72  RELIGION  AND  LIP^E 

divine  breaks  through  and  touches  human 
hfe.  In  the  prophetic  ecstasy  or  in  the 
stately  ceremonial  ritual  the  conditions  are 
given  for  this  contact  with  the  power  or 
powers  upon  which  man  feels  his  essen- 
tial dependence.  Under  all  the  varied  and 
ofttimes  strange  and  even  revolting  sym- 
bolism of  religion  there  speaks  this  faith 
in  man  that  he  is  in  some  way  linked  with, 
and  responsible  to,  a  higher  unseen  world, 
which  is  the  source  and  home  of  those 
ideals  he  strives  himself  to  find  and  per- 
fect, and  in  turn  to  work  into  the  fabric  of 
the  process  of  life. 

From  the  primitive  animism  of  man  in 
savage  simplicity  to  the  lofty  idealism  of 
Plato  or  the  transcendentalism  of  Kant 
human  life  has  never  been  without  its  wit- 
nesses to  this  tremendous  faith,  nor  has 
this  faith  ever  failed  to  justify  its  reality 
by  recreating  and  transforming  men  and 
the  world.  In  the  whole  range  of  human 
experience  no  force  has  been  more  patently 
in  evidence  in  the  affairs  of  man  than  this 
abiding  faith.  Even  when  the  attempt  to 
formulate  this  faith  either  in  a  religion  or 
a  philosophy  or  a  rule  of  conduct  fails  to 


CREATIVE  IDEALISM  73 

wholly  meet  the  inevitable  test  of  farther 
experience  and  new  demands,  the  faith  it- 
self survives  the  wreck  of  the  formulation, 
and  goes  again  to  work  at  new  formulation. 

Religion  has  always  taught  men  under 
one  form  or  another  that  they  are  coopera- 
tive creative  agencies  with  the  powers  that 
are  unseen.  Whatever  else  totemism  is  or 
is  not,  it  marks  the  emphasis  man  put 
upon  the  connection  of  his  higher  life  with 
a  world  of  spirits  beyond  him  and  cooperat- 
ing with  him.  For  it  is  important  to  re- 
member that  religion  never  exhausts  itself 
in  the  thought  of  dependence  (as  Schleier- 
macher's  theory  taught),  but  always  in- 
cludes the  thought  of  sharing  life  with  the 
god  and  cooperating  with  him. 

Thus  in  the  formation  of  an  ideal  the 
thought  of  the  unseen  power,  however 
named  or  symbolized,  has  always  accom- 
panied man.  The  natural  expression  has 
been  a  tribal  god,  or  a  god  of  the  group, 
who  guards,  inspires,  and  struggles  with 
and  for  the  group.  The  infinite  attributes 
with  which  the  reflections  of  highly  de- 
veloped religion  invest  the  conception  of 
God  do  not  belong  to  this  lower  stage  of 


74  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

simple  primitive  acceptance  in  naive  man- 
ner of  the  tribal  god  as  friend  and  helper. 
He  is  powerful  to  help,  and  willing  to  do 
battle  for  the  group  that  is  faithful  to  him. 
In  general,  his  sway  has  geographical  limits. 
The  home  of  the  group  is  his  home.  Je- 
hovah is  for  Israel  the  God  who  brought 
them  out  of  the  land  of  Egj^pt,  and  the 
other  gods  the  Israelitish  tribes  or  phratries 
are  not  to  worship  because  he  is  a  jealous 
God.  He  becomes  the  guardian  and  cham- 
pion of  the  life  of  the  tribe  in  all  its  aspects. 
Thus  from  the  beginning  God  is  the  guar- 
antee of  the  ideals  of  a  humanity  that  is 
ever  creating  a  new  world  of  moral  and 
religious  emotion,  and  generation  after 
generation  of  men  have  felt  the  cooperation 
of  powers  not  their  own  in  the  formation  of 
these  ideals  and  the  translation  of  them  into 
life  and  conduct. 

The  two  phases  of  this  process  of  giving 
ideals  to  the  group  are  the  conservation  of 
the  past  gains,  and  the  reinterpretation  of 
these  in  the  light  of  farther  experience. 
Thus  the  priestly  function  guards  the  ideals 
of  the  past.  In  them  the  priest  feels  that 
he  has  access  to  the  creative  life.     The 


CREATIVE  IDEALISM  75 

school,  the  church,  the  academy,  the  poH- 
tical  following  all  are  bent  upon  the  main- 
tenance of  their  several  traditions,  and  in 
them  see  the  ideal  life  set  forth.  God  is 
working  in  these  institutions  and  caring  for 
the  ideal  life,  which  is  in  all  its  aspects, 
whether  artistic,  literary,  moral,  or  reli- 
gious, the  goal  of  the  true  man. 

Selfishness,  and  especially  subtle  forms 
of  class  selfishness,  easily  make  these  con- 
servative forces  the  mere  ignoble  instru- 
ments of  their  narrower  purpose.  At  the 
same  time  it  is  unjust  and  unhistorical  to 
overlook  the  fact  that  it  is  in  these  insti- 
tutional and  essentially  conservative  ways 
of  thinking  that  the  creative  ideals  of  the 
individual  and  the  group  are  handed  down. 
The  ideal  must  clothe  itself  with  material 
fact.  The  artistic  instinct  must  find  ex- 
pression in  beautiful  form  or  tone,  and  the 
new  creative  religious  ideal  must  express 
itself  in  fellowships  and  sacraments,  in 
buildings  and  new  codes  of  worship  and 
conduct.  In  the  undifferentiated  life  all 
ideals  are  essentially  religious.  Painting 
is  worship  or  the  handmaid  of  worship. 
Music  is  communion  with  the  Unseen.    The 


76  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

architect  builds  the  habitation  of  the  Most 
High.  The  scholar  communes  with  the 
Eternal  in  a  sacred  tongue  handed  down 
as  infallible  tradition  and  divinely  given 
poetry.  The  sacredness  and  high  signifi- 
cance of  these  outward  forms  increase  as 
age  justifies  their  usefulness.  Rightly  men 
come  to  feel  that  he  who  has  no  reverence 
for  the  past  and  no  sympathetic  insight 
into  its  future  significance,  has  little  claim 
to  understand  the  present  and  little  power 
to  rightly  create  a  future.  In  the  history 
of  the  past  all  men  may  find  real  contact 
with  the  unseen  reality,  and  may  come  into 
vital  relationship  with  its  creative  ideals. 
And  in  such  contacts  we  may  ourselves 
gain  the  creative  power  to  reconstruct  in 
cooperation  with  our  generation  the  life 
that  lies  around  us.  Thus  the  classic  forms 
of  Greece  and  the  religious  inspirations  of 
the  Jewish  prophets  are  always  awakening 
men  anew  to  the  ideal  life,  and  kindling 
again  in  them  new  hopes  and  new  aspira- 
tions. For  all  men  who  are  really  at  work 
at  all  feel  themselves  creatively  at  work. 
They  may  be  only  intending  to  build  again 
the  new  generation  in  the  likeness  of  the 


CREATIVE  IDEALISM  77 

old;  they  may  simply  desire  to  create  again 
forms  like  those  of  the  honored  past.  But 
the  most  conservative  and  confident  priest 
of  the  ideal  life  in  any  of  its  unnumbered 
ministries  is  eagerly  at  work  rebuilding 
his  day  and  generation  in  the  likeness  of 
his  ideal  wherever  he  may  have  found  it. 
And  in  doing  this  even  the  most  eagerly 
conservative  spirit,  who  thinks  he  finds  the 
whole  of  truth  in  the  great  traditions  of  a 
past  art  or  an  historic  religion,  but  who 
goes  about  his  task  of  lovingly  restating  the 
content  of  that  life,  becomes,  according  to 
the  measure  of  his  success,  a  new  creative 
element,  a  distinct  factor  in  the  inevitably 
new  world  of  his  to-morrow. 

And  in  like  manner  he  who  most  intelli- 
gently feels  himself  the  bearer  of  a  new 
message  to  mankind  marks  his  dependence 
upon  the  past.  With  something  like  im- 
patience Jesus  pointed  to  past  prophecy  as 
the  source  from  which  his  critics  also  could 
learn  the  truths  he  taught.  Wagner  felt 
himself  the  logical  outcome  of  Beet- 
hoven's rebellion  against  uncreative  musi- 
cal monotony. 

At  the   same   time   we   lesser  ones   feel 


78  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

ourselves  brought  by  genius  into  touch 
with  eternal  reality,  and  see  in  the  genuine 
prophetic  ecstasy  a  breaking  through  into 
our  world  of  material  fact  of  a  new  creative 
energy,  and  speak  of  the  prophet,  whether 
in  art  or  in  religion,  as  inspired.  We  easily 
recognize  the  fact  that  this  inspiration  has 
its  degrees  and  its  ranges;  that  it  is  marked 
by  its  purpose  as  of  a  higher  or  a  lower 
scale  of  value  to  human  life.  The  word 
"divine"  may  be  used  to  cover  the  genius 
of  a  Shakespeare  or  the  inflatus  of  Isaiah. 
What  marks  them  both  to  us  as  of  su- 
perior mold  is  the  fact  that  their  work  is 
revelation.  What  gives  the  higher  value  to 
the  religious  prophet  in  contrast  to  the  artist 
or  the  litterateur  is  that  he  speaks  to  us  of 
God,  while  they  speak  to  us  of  a  human  life, 
and  that  our  daily  experience  leads  us  to  cry 
out  after  that  revelation  of  God  in  whom 
all  our  ideals  seem  to  have  their  source  and 
guarantee. 

The  function  of  the  prophet  in  all  ages 
has  been  the  proclamation  of  a  new  crea- 
tive ideal.  Our  first  impulse  is,  therefore, 
always  to  stone  him,  because  he  can  re- 
create our  ideals  only  by,  in  a  measure,  de- 


CREATIVE  IDEALISM  79 

stroying  and  superseding  past  ideals.  We 
are  exceeding  loath  to  part  with  these 
precious  ideals  of  the  past,  and  just  in  pro- 
portion as  the  prophet's  revelation  is  new 
it  seems  diflScult  to  in  any  way  harmonize 
the  claims  of  the  new  and  the  old.  Yet  in 
the  long  run  the  new  ideal  works  its  way 
into  life  and  actually  creates  an  environ- 
ment in  which  it  settles  down  and  lives, 
and  we  then  build  the  tombs  of  the  men 
who  gave  us  the  new  ideals,  and  real- 
ize that  once  more  we  were  slaying  the 
prophets  and  stoning  them  that  were  sent 
unto  us. 

Nothing  marks  genius  so  emphatically  as 
this  quality  of  revelation.  Genius,  whether 
in  the  region  of  art,  literature,  music,  or 
religion,  is  not  merely  a  capacity  for  taking 
pains  or  a  gift  of  hard  work.  These  things 
seem  to  exist  sometimes  almost  to  the  ex- 
clusion of  genius.  The  prophetic  genius  is 
inspired.  He  sees  and  knows  what  we  do 
not  see  or  know  until  he  reveals  it  to  us, 
and  on  its  highest  reaches  we  feel  at  once 
that  flesh  and  blood  have  not  revealed 
these  things  either  to  him  or  to  us,  but  that 
God    has    spoken;    that    the    Infinite    has 


80  KELIGION  AND  LIFE 

touched  creatively  again  a  plastic  life,  and 
is  forming  and  reforming  it. 

Moreover,  our  ears  are  dull,  our  senses 
heavy,  and  the  vision  of  the  prophet  may 
easily  seem  to  us  a  wild  and  silly  tale.  We 
have  also  been  stupidly  foolish  from  time 
to  time  in  our  acceptance  of  disordered 
fancy  for  heavenly  revelation.  Hence  we 
rather  gladly  escape  if  we  can  the  painful 
process  of  readjustments  of  our  inner  life. 
Children,  and  not  the  wise,  the  babes  and 
the  simple,  rather  than  teachers  and  ex- 
perts, must  be  the  prophet's  pupils,  until 
his  creative  vision  has  formed  a  new  world 
in  which  men  then  live,  unconscious  often 
of  the  birth  pangs  when  the  Spirit  brooded 
again  upon  the  face  of  the  deep,  and  dark- 
ness gave  way  to  light. 

Great  are  the  prophets'  risks.  Self- 
deception  seems  quite  as  common  as  de- 
liberate quackery,  and  once  upon  the 
pathway  of  prophetic  leadership,  self- 
deception  may  play  a  role  even  in  the 
lives  of  superior  genius,  and  a  prophetic 
soul  like  that  of  Savonarola  may  end  in  a 
great  and  heart-breaking  catastrophe.  Or 
the  inspiration  may  seem  to  fail,  and  in 


CREATIVE  IDEALISM  81 

desperation  means  are  sought  to  heighten 
the  hfe  and  restore  the  vision.  Early 
religious  leadership  sought  to  superinduce 
by  drugs,  by  fastings,  by  wild  fantastic 
dances,  or  by  self-inflicted  wounds  the 
vision  and  the  rapture,  and  so  secure  con- 
tact with  the  eternal.  How  far  these 
superinduced  trances  and  visions  have  ac- 
tually affected  the  really  creative  ideals  of 
mankind  and  actually  led  the  way  up  to 
larger  and  fuller  life  is  a  question  in  which 
religious  prejudice  would,  at  present,  be  so 
concerned  that  an  objective  estimate  is 
made  very  difficult.  All  that  can  be  said 
with  certainty  is  that  the  trend  of  human 
experience  is  away  from  such  visions  and 
raptures,  and  that  deep  distrust  of  them 
animates  the  intelligent  leaders  of  religious 
thought  in  Hinduism,  Mohammedanism, 
and  both  branches  of  Christianity,  while 
Judaism  has  never  been  prone  to  these 
excesses. 

THE  LITERATURE 

For  this  discussion  the  books  that  may  prove 
most  suggestive  are  perhaps  William  James's  "Will 
to  Believe"  and  "Pragmatism,"     Bradley's  "Ap- 


82  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

pearances  and  Reality,"  Bergson's  "Creative  Evolu- 
tion," Royce's  "The  World  and  the  Individual." 
Compare  -^-ith  these  the  basal  works  of  Kant  and 
Lotze  and  Fechner  already  mentioned.  In  Kant 
and  Fechner  many  of  the  positions  of  the  most 
modern  philosophy  are  foreshadowed  or  plainly  set 
forth. 


CHAPTER  VI 

Religion  and  Mastery  of  the  Material 

World 

The  religious  ideals  of  mankind  sooner 
or  later  always  attempt  some  material  ex- 
pression. The  endeavor  is  soon  made  to 
clothe  the  religious  ideal  with  material  fact. 
Jacob  has  his  dream,  and  erects  an  altar 
to  be  a  permanent  place  of  access  to  the 
Unseen  and  Invisible.  Weapons  are  con- 
secrated to  the  use  of  the  god,  the  tribe 
seeks  to  organize  its  life  after  the  religious 
ideal  handed  down  from  generation  to 
generation,  but  with  steadily  increasing 
evolution.  Thus  when  at  last  stable  con- 
ditions are  reached  the  temple  becomes  the 
center  of  the  group  life,  and  mastery  over 
the  various  materials  at  man's  disposal  is 
sought,  that  the  temple  may  be  resplendent 
and  impressive.  In  this  way  the  mastery 
over  the  material  world  is  separated  in 
good  measure  from  immediate  utility,  and 
is  linked  as  an  end  with  ideal  aims  and 
much  less  obvious  advantages  than  warmth 

83 


84  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

and  protection.  The  temple  becomes  the 
center  of  education  in  a  manifold  way.  All 
writing  seems  originally  to  have  been 
linked  with  religious  records.  The  temples 
become  the  archives  of  the  group,  and  the 
homes  of  the  learned  and  the  wise.  Amid 
all  the  trickery  and  deception  that  soon 
clusters  about  a  priestly  caste  and  a  de- 
veloped temple  life,  it  is  plain  that  prac- 
tically nothing  has  so  advanced  man's 
mastery  over  the  material  world  as  this 
sacred  learning  and  it  abundantly  justifies 
their  existence.  They  have  all  been  very 
far  from  ideal,  and  in  the  late  stages 
of  hardened  traditionalism  have  been  even 
hindrances  to  progress,  but  the  thoughtful 
man  must  be  set  to  wonder  what  progress 
we  would  have  had  at  all  without  them. 
Those  who  often  uncritically  glorify  pagan- 
ism, and  are  inclined  to  take  a  negative 
attitude  to  religion  in  its  name,  would  do 
well  to  remember  that  all  the  paganism  we 
know,  and  particularly  Greek  paganism, 
was  religious  through  and  through.  Greek 
art  has,  in  fact,  its  highest  significance  in 
its  religious  character.  The  mastery  of  the 
external  world  of  stone  and  wood  and  clay 


RELIGION  AND  MASTERY  85 

was  gained  first  and  foremost  in  the  name 
of  that  world  beyond  ruled  by  the  gods, 
and  giving  background  and  content  to  the 
thinking  of  Greece. 

It  is  easy  to  forget  how  desperately  poor 
the  worlds  of  Greece  and  Rome,  of  Baby- 
lon and  Egypt  were.  The  struggle  for 
home  and  food  for  the  vast  majority  cost 
all  the  energy  they  had.  Only  some  great 
ideal  could  hold  them  to  the  extra  effort 
needed  to  build  noble  buildings  and  splen- 
did marble  piles.  And  the  sacred  buildings 
of  antiquity  were  not  the  product  of  simple 
imperial  whim.  The  grinding  taxation  and 
the  fearful  cost  could  be  met  only  in  the 
interest  of  what  was  nationally  important. 
Not  even  national  defense  could  seemingly 
call  out  the  sacrifice  religion  exacted  with 
relative  ease.  Nor  do  these  sacrifices  be- 
come less  as  the  basis  of  the  ruling  class 
becomes  broader.  The  limited  democra- 
cies of  Greece,  Rome,  and  the  Free  Cities 
outstrip  the  imperialisms  of  the  past  in 
the  rapidity  of  their  progress  and  in  the 
prodigality  of  their  expenditure  for  ideal 
ends. 

Nor    was    it    otherwise    when    a    larger 


86  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

world  made  impossible  the  conditions  both 
political  and  intellectual  that  obtained  in 
Hellenism.  The  so-called  decline  and  fall  of 
the  Roman  empire  has  been  too  narrowly 
interpreted.  The  lamentations  of  a  class 
have  been  mistaken  for  the  tribulations  of 
the  people.  In  fact,  it  is  doubtful  whether 
the  mass  of  men  within  the  Roman  world 
were  not  vastly  better  off  in  most  of  the 
days  of  so-called  decline  than  at  the  time 
of  the  undisputed  domination  of  the  im- 
perial oligarchy.  What  the  decline  and 
fall  really  meant  was  the  bankruptcy  of  a 
slave-holding  aristocratic  oligarchy  because 
it  was  an  ineflScient  economic  form  of 
human  organization.  The  world  passed 
from  the  hands  of  this  militarj^  aristocracy 
to  a  freedman  class,  whose  more  efficient 
productive  methods  made  them  the  natural 
heirs  of  the  well-nigh  exhausted  heritage. 
Here,  again,  the  one  force  that  was  strong 
enough  to  hold  that  class  together  and  give 
it  a  sufficient  unity  of  purpose  to  beat  back 
invasion  from  the  North  and  East,  and 
enough  vitality  to  reconquer  and  recon- 
struct its  material  environment,  was  Chris- 
tianity.      It     is     to     this     Christianized 


RELIGION  AND  MASTERY  87 

freedman  class  that  the  world  owes  the 
preservation  of  Hellenistic  culture,  and  the 
reordering  in  the  spirit  of  Roman  law  of 
the  occidental  world.  It  would  be  un- 
grateful to  forget  the  contribution  of  Arabic 
scholarship,  and  the  services  of  the  syna- 
gogue, but  these  also  were  religious  in  their 
main  interest,  and  illustrate  only  the  more 
clearly  the  profound  influence  of  religion  in 
giving  men  ideals  of  a  creative  character, 
and  bidding  them  obtain  mastery  over 
their  material  world. 

All  the  guilds  of  the  Middle  Ages  were 
in  the  beginning  religious  organizations,  and 
the  arts  and  crafts  rose  under  the  inspira- 
tion of  great  cathedrals,  whose  influence 
was  reflected  in  domestic  architecture,  and 
in  the  nobler  attempts  to  express  life  in  the 
rebellious  media  of  oak  and  stone.  Home 
adornment  is  a  relatively  recent  develop- 
ment. The  cathedral  and  church,  the 
monastery  and  chapel  gave  the  lines  along 
which  the  palaces  of  kings  and  the  homes 
of  the  wealthy  were  later  adorned.  All  art 
is  practically  the  outcome  of  men  trying  to 
express  their  religious  ideals.  And  this  is 
the    case    everywhere,    in    Greece    and    in 


88  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

Rome,  in  Egypt  or  Babylon,  in  India  or 
Mexico. 

The  battle  men  have  fought  with  their 
material  environment,  making  stone  shel- 
ter them,  and  wood  obey  their  behests,  and 
compelling  clay  and  canvas  to  give  back 
life,  has  been  fought  in  largest  part  under 
the  inspirations  and  enthusiasms  of  reli- 
gion, so  that  when  men  tell  us  they  have 
found  a  substitute  for  religion  or  that 
these  inspirations  and  enthusiasms  have  no 
objective  basis  in  fact,  it  certainly  makes 
us  anxious  for  our  civilization,  lest  the  sub- 
stitute prove  futile  and  the  real  force  be 
lost.  It  has  not  been  the  only  incentive. 
Love,  hunger  and  cold,  military  necessity 
and  mere  prying  curiosity  are  factors  of  no 
mean  value  in  man's  progress  upward,  but 
of  all  the  factors  we  may  name  no  one  is 
comparable  for  a  moment,  as  a  mere  mat- 
ter of  history,  with  religious  enthusiasm  for 
the  incarnation  of  religious  ideals.  The 
great  obstacle  to  progress  is  inertia.  Only 
great  excitement  can  at  times  overcome 
this,  and  for  its  steady  overcoming  only 
some  great  ideal  enthusiasm  can  be  really 
counted  upon.    No  one  enthusiasm  has  had 


RELIGION  AND  MASTERY  89 

the  enduring,  steady,  pushing  force  from 
generation  to  generation  exhibited  by  the 
reHgious  ideal.  Hence  nearly  all  the  per- 
manent monuments  of  past  ages  that  de- 
manded steady  struggle  with  brick  and 
stone  to  give  them  character  are  religious. 
So  it  is  in  the  Middle  Ages  and  up  to  our 
own  day. 

Only  the  most  shallow  and  superficial 
philosophy  of  history  can  in  the  face  of  the 
facts  trace  man's  progress  toward  com- 
plete mastery  of  his  world  to  individual 
selfishness.  The  hold  of  the  group  upon 
life,  the  heightening  of  individual  desire  by 
social  contact,  the  almost  complete  subor- 
dination of  the  individual  desire  to  the 
group  ideal  are  now  commonplaces  of 
the  classroom  of  psychology,  and  these 
group  ideals  which  have  for  uncounted 
ages  held  men  to  their  task  of  winning  a 
material  world  have  always  been  touched 
and  generally  formed  by  religion.  The 
conquest  of  the  great  Northwest  as  traced 
in  the  fascinating  pages  of  a  Parkman,  or 
the  winning  of  a  foothold  on  the  bleak 
New  England  shores,  was  the  direct  out- 
come of  social  religious  enthusiasms,   and 


90  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

however  much  modern  material  advance 
may  seem  in  some  of  its  most  important 
phases  to  be  now  independent  of  religious 
life,  it  will  be  well  for  the  historian  to 
pause  and  ask  himself  more  seriously  than 
some  seem  inclined  to  do,  what  is  still  the 
relationship  between  the  creative  ideals  of 
the  present  and  the  religious  enthusiasms 
that  are  covering  the  land  with  churches, 
hospitals,  colleges,  social  settlements,  and 
philanthropic  centers ;  for  to-day,  as  always, 
the  religious  ideal  is  expressing  itself  in 
material  fact.  When  mechanical  material- 
ism seemed  at  the  height  of  its  fashion. 
Christian  Science  spread  as  a  kind  of 
visible  protest  a  network  of  churches  all 
over  the  land,  calling  out  in  a  generation 
more  actual  embodied  human  effort  in 
buildings  and  books  than  naked  material- 
ism has  to  its  credit  in  three  centuries. 

To  the  task  of  mastery  of  this  material 
world  some  ideal  of  categorical  imperative 
insistence  is  needed.  It  would  be  absurd 
to  try  and  link  this  ideal  in  every  case  with 
the  dogmatic  content  of  some  religious  be- 
lief. No  sensible  man  would  make  such  a 
claim,    but   to    trace   the    actual    religious 


RELIGION  AND  MASTERY  91 

elements  in  the  ideals  which  have  moved 
men  to  such  real  mastery  is  a  revelation  of 
the  power  the  religious  ideal  still  exerts  in 
a  thousand  ways  hidden  from  the  ordinary 
and  superficial  onlooker.  Indeed,  the  un- 
fortunate identification  of  the  religious  en- 
thusiasm with  its  dogmatic  content  has 
blinded  men  to  the  real  issues  and  often 
led  them  astray  in  their  analysis  of  a 
situation. 

Our  material  world  is  still  but  indiffer- 
ently mastered.  We  are  still  engaged  in  a 
fight  for  subsistence  and  safety.  Almost 
nothing  so  hinders  us  in  our  struggle  as 
mutual  suspicion  and  selfishness.  We  are 
flinging  away  a  vast  percentage  of  our 
energy  in  watching  each  other  to  keep 
some  from  stealing.  We  waste  our  re- 
sources in  useless  military  provision  for 
absurd  assaults.  Neither  science,  nor  com- 
merce, nor  self-interest  suggests  any  remedy. 
Is  it  not  time  to  inquire  whether  there  is 
any  ideal  enthusiasm  suflSciently  world- 
wide in  its  reach  and  sufficiently  imperative 
in  its  insistence  that  will  give  men  pause 
in  the  predatory  life,  and  call  them  more 
effectively  to  the  task  of  mastery  of  the 


92  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

material  world,  to  clothe  this  ideal  with 
material  fact? 

In  past  ages  religious  enthusiasm  has 
bound  men  together  as  no  other  interest 
has  succeeded  in  doing.  The  bitterness  of 
religious  wars  is  a  result  of  this  power  of 
cohesion.  Nothing  but  religious  zeal,  how- 
ever misdirected,  would  have  held  men 
together  through  the  long  struggles  of  the 
Mohammedan  wars,  the  Crusades,  and  the 
Thirty  Years'  War  in  Europe.  And  the 
question  must  be  raised  and  answered,  Is 
there  any  force  that  can  possibly  take  its 
place?  The  nobler  world  religions  all 
profess  international  unity  and  peace. 
Buddhism,  Confucianism,  Christianity,  and 
Judaism,  the  Mother  of  Christianity,  are 
cosmopolitan  in  faith  and  fact.  All  teach 
loving  regard  for  all  others,  and  all  have 
in  varied  degree  the  missionary  and  helpful 
spirit.  The  world  to-day  is  now  most 
desperately  in  need  of  international  peace. 
Vast  changes  have  come  over  our  lives. 
We  struggle  now  with  a  new  outlook  upon 
all  life,  and  are  on  the  eve  of  readjustments 
of  human  relations  that  will  tax  our  ma- 
terial resources  as  never  before.     Are  we 


RELIGION  AND  MASTERY  93 

going  to  continue  throwing  away  nearly 
half  of  our  national  revenues  on  purposes 
fundamentally  anti-social?  And  have  not  a 
world-wide  religious  reawakening  and  a 
world-wide  religious  federation  some  place 
in  our  thought  and  hope? 


THE  LITERATURE 

The  works  of  Ruskin  may  open  our  eyes  to  some 
of  the  relations  of  religion  to  art.  The  relations 
of  religion  to  early  Babylonian  civilization  may  be 
studied  in  Professor  Jastrow's  admirable  "Religion 
of  Babylon  and  Assyria"  (the  enlarged  form,  Ger- 
man, 1904).  For  Egypt,  see  Breasted's  "History 
of  Egypt"  and  "History  of  the  Ancient  Egyptians," 
Ernan's  "Religion  of  the  Egyptians"  (German  and 
English  translation).  For  the  guilds  of  the  Middle 
Ages,  see  Gross's  "The  Gild  Merchant,"  two 
volumes,  1890,  and  Chapters  V  and  VI  of  Kropot- 
kin's  "Mutual  Aid"  (1903). 


CHAPTER  VII 

Religion  and  Society 

In  spite  of  the  great  work  already  done 
in  trying  to  clear  up  the  questions  con- 
nected with  tribal  organization  much  re- 
mains as  yet  most  puzzling.  One  thing, 
however,  stands  out  clearly,  and  that  is 
that  the  whole  early  organization  of  human 
life  was  controlled  by  an  elaborate  religious 
system.  Wherever  we  turn  we  find  the 
marriage  customs  under  a  most  stringent 
system  of  taboo.  No  other  force  seems  able 
to  prevent  the  various  relations  between 
the  sexes  that  experience,  no  doubt,  had 
proved  disastrous.  All  over  the  world  re- 
ligion fhngs  its  character  of  sacredness  over 
the  degrees  of  relationship  within  which 
marriage  takes  place;  and  in  Greek  tragedy 
no  guilt  is  blacker  and  no  breach  of  law 
so  horrible  as  to  offend  against  the  mar- 
riage taboo  even  unwittingly.  This  religious 
social  control  extends  also  to  the  other 
family  relationships.  Duty  to  parents,  the 
obedience  of  children,  the  relationships  of 

94 


RELIGION  AND  SOCIETY  95 

blood,  with  the  obHgations  of  blood  re- 
venge and  the  duties  of  confraternity,  all 
receive  the  high  sanction  of  religion. 

The  Old  Testament  bears  witness  to 
what  are  now  seen  to  be  a  custom  of  primi- 
tive people  everywhere.  There  is,  as  in  the 
story  of  Cain  and  Abel,  a  limit  to  blood 
revenge  within  the  brotherly  group.  The 
"Sword  Song"  illustrates  the  farther  limi- 
tation under  religious  sanction  of  the  blood 
revenge.  The  sacrilege  of  taboo  is  wit- 
nessed to  by  the  story  of  Abraham  in 
Egypt.  Isaac  must  seek  a  wife  of  a  certain 
gens,  and  so  all  through  the  earlier  docu- 
ments we  see  the  steady  march  of  the 
group  to  national  life  under  the  religious 
enthusiasm  of  leaders  who  are  the  "called 
of  God."  But  this  is  not  exceptional. 
Whether  in  Mexico  or  Alaska,  in  India  or 
in  Egypt,  we  see  the  same  phenomena. 
The  reverence  before  the  religious  taboo, 
the  horror  that  sacrilege  inspires,  the 
fearsome  shrinking  from  disobedience  to 
divine  command  chasten  and  soften  and 
regulate  the  relationships  between  man 
and  man,  and  gradually  between  group  and 
group.     Indeed,  where  groups  do  not  have 


96  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

the  same  god  there  can  be  no  natural 
ethical  relationship,  and  there  must  be 
substituted  a  formal  legal  agreement.  All 
intergroup  relationships  have,  therefore,  on 
into  our  own  day  an  artificial  and  legal 
character.  Only  that  is  wrong  which  is 
forbidden  in  the  treaty  document.  There 
is  some  reason  for  believing  that  the  origin 
of  all  written  law  is  thus  a  treaty  arrange- 
ment, that  the  "tables"  of  both  Roman 
and  Jewish  law  date  from  the  intergroup 
ethics  that  needed  a  written  sanction 
where  the  "blood"  sanction  was  becoming 
dim. 

Here,  again,  it  is  religion  that  lends  its 
sanction  to  the  written  law.  Every  court 
bears  witness  in  its  forms  and  oaths  to  the 
exceedingly  fundamental  character  of  this 
sanction.  All  early  trials  were  the  tri- 
bunals of  God.  Between  equals  God  is 
alone  the  arbiter,  and  mortal  combat  was 
the  earliest  w^ay  of  discovering  his  decision. 
Always  lot  and  sign  and  omen  give  some 
clue  to  his  righteous  will,  and  in  all  cases 
he  was  the  final  arbiter. 

Since  the  Reformation  among  European 
nations  the  thought  of  religion  as  the  ex- 


RELIGION  AND  SOCIETY  97 

elusive  group  bond  has  more  or  less  passed 
away.  We  still  speak  of  "Christian"  na- 
tions, and  conserve  state  churches,  and 
many  outward  forms  of  a  past  religious 
life;  but  even  in  countries  predominantly 
Roman  Catholic  the  older  conception  of  a 
priestly  state  is  really  gone.  Not  even  in 
Spain  does  it  survive  as  more  than  a 
shadow  of  the  former  faith.  Hence  it  is 
easy  to  raise  the  question  whether  religion 
has  not  fulfilled  its  function,  and  now 
hands  over  its  work  to  other  and  more 
modern  interests. 

The  separation  of  church  and  state 
seems  only  a  question  of  time  even  in 
those  lands  where  it  has  been  most  inter- 
woven with  the  national  thinking  and  the 
social  life.  At  the  same  time  religion  has 
never  been  coextensive  with  ecclesiasti- 
cism.  On  the  contrary,  as  our  discussion 
has  shown,  the  function  of  a  priestly 
church  almost  inevitably  brings  it  sooner 
or  later  into  conflict  with  religion  on  its 
prophetic  revelationary  side.  The  con- 
servative instinct  of  the  ecclesiastical  for- 
mulation of  religion  must,  almost  of 
necessity,  attach  itself  to  the  social  order 


98  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

out  of  which  it  sprang.  Hence  the  truth 
that  nations  are  repudiating  the  national 
churches  only  marks  the  fact  that  since 
the  Reformation  human  history  has  seen 
the  rise  and  relative  decline  of  several 
social  orders,  and,  indeed,  that  any  na- 
tional church  has  survived  the  changes 
that  have  gone  on  since  1648,  1793,  1832, 
and  1848,  not  to  speak  of  such  crises  as 
our  own  in  1865,  only  emphasizes  the 
truth  that  no  ecclesiastical  organization  is 
so  wholly  encased  in  priestly  tradition  as 
to  lose  entirely  the  prophetic  elasticity 
which  enables  it  to  readapt  itself  to  a 
changing  order.  The  national  churches 
have,  without  being  always  conscious  of 
the  fact,  changed  their  message  and  char- 
acter with  the  growth  of  the  new  national 
life.  This  is  the  significance  of  the  High, 
Low%  and  Broad  church  parties  in  England, 
of  the  Old,  Mediating,  and  Modern  theolo- 
gies of  the  Lutheran  Church  in  Germany, 
and  of  Modernism  in  the  Roman  Catholic 
communion. 

There  is  absolutely  no  evidence  to  show 
that  religion  to-day  has  less  of  a  hold  over 
human  life  than  in  its  past  history,  and 


RELIGION  AND  SOCIETY  99 

when  anyone  asks  where  are  the  moral  and 
ideal  elements  of  any  national  life  to  be 
found,  the  answer  of  any  unbiased  ob- 
server will  still  have  to  be,  not  exclusively, 
but  yet  predominantly  in  the  organized 
churches. 

The  obedience  in  the  past  of  the  indi- 
vidual to  the  group  religion  by  no  means 
proves  all  the  individuals  were  in  any  sense 
religious.  Formal  acceptance  of  the  group 
life  simply  included  this  conformity.  So 
to-day  American  citizenship  includes  a 
conformity  to  many  usages  that  in  no  way 
reflect  or  affect  the  inner  life  of  the  indi- 
vidual. The  breaking  down  of  uniformity 
in  the  manner  of  living  and  thinking  within 
national  groups  is  due  to  many  causes,  and 
acceptance  of  some  form  of  organized  re- 
ligious life  signifies  a  deliberate  choice  and 
an  overcoming  of  inertia  that  renders 
church  membership  to-day  a  very  different 
and  more  significant  thing  than  it  once 
was. 

It  is  always  hard  to  trace  successfully 
the  complicated  conditions  of  national  life 
and  action,  but  no  one  can  deny  that  to-day 
moral    ideals   are   an    increasing   factor   in 


100  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

national  action  everywhere;  that  men  are 
swayed  in  their  purposes  by  moral  incite- 
ment as  perhaps  never  before.  It  is  true 
that  the  inhibitions  of  a  keen  intellectual 
analysis  are  felt  at  times  as  perhaps  was 
once  not  the  case,  and  waves  of  uncon- 
trolled hysteria,  although  not  by  any 
means  excluded,  are  at  least  increasingly 
unlikely.  But  we  must  not  measure  reli- 
gion as  a  force  by  its  climactic  emotional 
periods.  The  hysterical  movements  that 
marked  the  period  of  the  Crusades  do  not 
in  anj^  way  prove  that  that  age  was  in 
reality  more  religious  than  calmer  times  in 
human  thought;  and  to-day,  when  rational 
analysis  tends  constantly  to  check  free 
emotional  self-expression,  not  only  religion, 
but  also  art  and  poetry,  find  less  emotional, 
but  no  less  real,  ways  of  interpreting  life. 
Robert  Browning  is  unthinkable  at  an 
earlier  date  than  the  end  of  the  nineteenth 
century,  and  it  may  well  be  that  intellectual 
analysis  will  give  WRy  in  a  near  future  to 
less  rationalized  expressions.  Then  again 
religion  and  art  will  control  human  conduct 
by  touching  it  once  more  mainly  on  the 
side  of  feeling  and  affection.    To-day,  how- 


RELIGION  AND  SOCIETY  101 

ever,  much  religious  pressure  wholly  es- 
capes notice  because  it  acts  on  the  intel- 
lectual rather  than  the  emotional  life,  and 
is  only  to  be  recognized  as  a  part  in  a 
creative  ideal  that  expresses  itself  almost 
entirely  in  action  or  a  theory  of  action. 

This  is  only  to  say  that  a  man's  real 
religion  enters  vitally  into  his  working 
faith.  And  we  no  longer  call  that  religion 
which  consists  simply  in  conformity  to  a 
group  life,  as  once  men  in  effect  did.  In 
other  words,  to-day  we  call  real  religion  only 
that  which  actually  sways  a  man's  con- 
duct, whereas  once  much  passed  for  religion 
which  consisted  in  being  swayed  by  group 
habit  or  emotion.  Thus  religion  means  a 
far  more  personal  and  unanalyzable  factor 
in  life  to-day  than  ever  before.  Attendance 
upon  mass  or  synagogue,  upon  church  or 
chapel  in  no  way  now  stamps  a  man  as  in 
reality  religious.  He  may  or  may  not  be 
religious,  and  we  try  to  watch  his  conduct, 
and  value  any  professions  he  may  make  by 
their  outcome  there. 

If,  therefore,  we  are  to  decide  the  ques- 
tion as  to  how  far  religion  still  affects 
men's  relations  with  one  another,  we  must 


102  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

try  to  examine  the  ideals  that  are  recreat- 
ing the  world  from  day  to  day.  Then  we 
must  ask  how  far  anything  like  vital  reli- 
gion is  an  element  in  these  ideals. 

Such  a  task  is  in  its  many  details  far  too 
large  a  one  for  these  pages.  Only  one  or 
two  things  can  be  pointed  out.  In  the  first 
place,  in  the  transformation  of  the  Oriental 
world,  and  of  China  and  Japan,  the  ideals 
that  are  at  work  are  those  of  Occidental 
culture.  Many  elements  in  that  culture 
impress  the  less  advanced  nations.  One,  of 
course,  is  the  sheer  brute  strength  of  our 
military  organization.  Another  is  our  com- 
mercial and  industrial  efficiency.  Then 
they  are  being  evidently  stirred  by  our 
relative  democracy  and  political  inde- 
pendence, but  not  least  is  the  religious 
education  which  is  connected  directly  with 
an  intense  religious  propaganda.  Of  this 
propaganda  the  ordinary  man  outside  the 
organized  church  life  has  as  vague  ideas  as 
the  Roman  literati  had  of  the  spread  of 
Christianity;  but  not  even  our  boasted 
commerce  makes  as  intense  and  venture- 
some efforts  at  winning  these  worlds  as 
Christianity.     It  has  a   vitality   that  ex- 


RELIGION  AND  SOCIETY  103 

presses  itself  in  missions,  hospitals,  schools, 
monasteries,  convents,  and  churches  all 
over  the  East,  and  in  a  thousand  ways  is 
undermining  the  old  pagan  world  and 
making  ready  the  soil  for  the  vast  changes 
evidently  impending.  As  a  mere  evidence 
of  the  tremendous  force  that  religion  repre- 
sents in  the  lives  of  modern  men  the  story 
of  missions  is  of  great  scientific  value,  for 
it  must  be  remembered  that  although  mis- 
sions are  as  old  as  Christianity,  the  over- 
whelming and  world-wide  organization, 
with  its  intense  life  and  emphasis  upon 
education,  is  completely  modern,  and  has 
an  effectiveness,  and  consequent  character, 
comparable  to  nothing  of  the  same  kind 
in  history.  Over  great  areas  of  life  these 
missionary  efforts  are  in  many  ways  modi- 
fying even  the  religions  which  oppose  them 
most,  and  compel  a  rival  zeal  and  higher 
and  higher  moral  standards. 

Buddhism  in  Japan  may  not  disappear, 
but  to  hold  its  own  against  the  impact  of 
Roman  Catholic  and  Protestant  missions  it 
must  take  on  new  life  and  must  minister 
with  increasing  effectiveness  to  the  reli- 
gious needs  of  Japan.    The  missionary  or- 


104  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

ganizations  are  signs  of  something — some 
force  great  enough  to  compel  men  to  give 
their  lives  in  increasing  numbers  to  the 
work  of  religious  propaganda,  and  great 
enough  to  organize  a  rapidly  increasing 
machinery  to  maintain  this  army  in  the 
field.  If  religion  is  a  vast  illusion,  it  is  one 
that  shows  no  signs  at  present  of  abate- 
ment, but,  rather,  is  manifesting  its  vi- 
tality in  a  way  even  more  striking  and 
dramatic  than  in  the  time  of  Mohammed 
or  the  Crusades. 

Nor  are  there  any  signs  that  a  general 
scientific  intelligence  is  taking  the  place 
of  religion  in  the  lives  of  men.  This  ex- 
pectation was  at  one  time  the  general  atti- 
tude of  a  certain  type  of  thoughtful  mind. 
A  wave  of  most  undeniably  useful  agnos- 
ticism swept  the  intellectual  world  about 
the  middle  of  the  nineteenth  century,  as  a 
similar  wave  of  dogmatic  rationalism  swept 
the  thought  of  the  early  eighteenth  century. 
These  movements  led  to  reinvestigation  of 
almost  every  accepted  position.  Nothing 
was  regarded  as  settled,  and  we  still  live 
in  this  atmosphere  of  intellectual  hesita- 
tion.     Mathematical   "certainty"   has   be- 


RELIGION  AND  SOCIETY  105 

come  a  beautiful  art  of  definition;  history, 
the  personal  interpretation  of  facts;  chem- 
istry, a  marvelous  structure  built  upon  an 
hypothesis  of  atomic  structure  no  man  can 
demonstrate  to  be  true;  phj^sics,  a  splendid 
creation  resting  on  a  brilliant  guess  that 
electric  ions  are  the  final  substratum  of 
extension  in  space.  And  yet  this  intel- 
lectual agnosticism,  whether  in  science  or 
religion,  whether  it  deals  with  the  author- 
ship of  the  fourth  Gospel,  or  the  very 
personal  history  of  Jesus,  or  the  question 
whether  mind  is  matter,  or  matter  is  mind, 
has  not  proved  a  weight  upon  the  activity 
of  our  life.  On  the  contrary,  at  no  time 
in  man's  history  has  he  gone  with  such 
triumphant  confidence  forward  to  do  and 
to  reconstruct  in  all  spheres  of  life  as  he 
has  under  the  spell  of  these  seemingly  so 
crippling  conclusions. 

The  general  hypothesis  of  an  evolution 
and  a  survival  of  the  fit  has  raised  all 
manner  of  ultimate  questions  such  as 
"Who  are  the  fit.''"  Are  simply  the 
brutally  strong  the  "fit,"  or  shall,  indeed, 
the  meek  inherit  the  earth?  Whence  are 
we    moving    in  the  stream   of  evolution? 


106  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

What  is  "progress"  if  there  be  no  goal? 
And  amid  all  these  questions  men  see  more 
clearly  than  ever  that  religious  faith  in  a 
higher  life,  a  nobler  manhood,  a  diviner 
ideal,  a  more  wondrous  vision  of  reality 
is  one  of  the  persistent  facts  that  survive 
all  intellectual  hesitation  and  all  philo- 
sophic doubt.  In  the  field  of  religion,  as 
in  all  other  fields,  the  test  of  truth  has 
become  the  vitalizing  power  of  the  faith 
to  accomplish,  to  strengthen,  to  quicken 
moral  activity,  to  sustain  and  comfort,  to 
direct  and  inspire.  And  one  note  of 
to-day  is  that  men  are  bound  together  by 
a  bond  of  unwavering  fidelity  to  intel- 
lectual sincerity  rather  than  by  bonds  of 
conformity  to  a  definite  group  type.  Many 
of  the  associations  of  men  are  no  longer 
avowedly  religious,  whose  inner  spirit  and 
whose  leaders  are  more  definitely  com- 
mitted to  religious  ideals  than  even  in  the 
days  when  every  trade  guild  was  an 
avowedly  religious  organization.  Thus,  for 
example,  the  social  settlement  movement 
would  have  no  such  place  in  men's  lives 
to-day  were  it  definitely  committed  to  any 
form  of  dogmatic  religion,  but  it  could  not 


RELIGION  AND  SOCIETY  107 

live  for  a  month  were  it  to  be  deprived  of 
the  support  of  religious  idealism. 

Can  any  man  imagine  the  life  of  the 
community  suddenly  deprived  of  the  re- 
ligious idealism  incarnate  in  the  churches? 
It  may  often  be  misdirected — what  human 
energy  is  not  often  misdirected?  It  may 
often  be  far  less  than  one  might  wish — 
where  does  any  reality  meet  our  nobler 
expectation?  But  what  it  means  year  in 
and  year  out  cannot  possibly  be  expressed 
in  even  the  really  astonishing  statistics  of 
the  United  States  census.  As  in  all  time, 
so  now,  religion  watches  over  man's  rela- 
tions to  his  fellow  man,  and  is  slowly  and 
constantly  transforming  and  remolding 
them  as  a  force  that  no  one  has  ever 
properly  and  justly  estimated  in  its  rela- 
tions to  the  other  formative  forces  in 
mean's  upward  struggle. 

THE  LITERATURE 

This  chapter  suggests  questions  raised  by  Kidd 
in  his  "Social  Evolution,"  and  compare  also  Drum- 
mond's  "Ascent  of  Man";  and  for  foreign  missions 
as  a  social  force  see  Dennis's  "Centennial  Survey  of 
Foreign  Missions"  and  Carroll's  "Religious  Census 
of  the  United  States." 


CHAPTER  VIII 

Types  of  Religious  Development 

In  the  previous  chapters  we  had  often 
occasion  to  speak  of  the  prophetic  and 
priestly  type  in  the  religious  development, 
but  there  are  other  lines  of  more  particular 
distinction  between  types  of  religion  on  its 
distinctly  personal  side  which  must  be 
considered  in  any  attempt  to  estimate  re- 
ligion in  its  relation  to  life.  Since  re- 
ligion must  be  regarded  as  a  reaction  of 
the  whole  personality,  and  fundamentally 
an  attitude  of  the  real  self  toward  what  is 
regarded  as  the  actually  highest  ideal,  these 
types  will  be  determined,  in  the  last 
analysis,  by  some  emphasis  in  that  reac- 
tion. It  will  be  convenient  to  classify 
these  emphases  under  the  three  main  as- 
pects of  the  life  of  the  soul.  There  are  the 
prevalently  emotional  types  of  religious 
life,  with  two  main  expressions  of  that 
emotional  life,  the  aesthetic  and  the  mystic 
— each  seeking  order  and  harmony  in  self- 
expression,  but  one  predominantly  in  the 

108 


RELIGIOUS  TYPES  109 

outer   life,  and  the  other  in  the  inner  ex- 
perience. 

Then  there  are  also  the  intellectual 
types.  These  too  have  a  twofold  classifica- 
tion. The  intellectual  interest  may  be 
dogmatic;  seeking  rest  in  some  final  and 
unquestioned  authority  found  in  an  in- 
tellectually satisfying  system.  The  in- 
terest in  this  mental  rest  is  a  somewhat 
complex  thing,  but  the  note  is  always  the 
same.  Another  intellectual  type  restlessly 
seeks  its  satisfaction  in  speculation,  al- 
though here,  again",  the  interest  in  the 
speculation  is  often  varied. 

Now,  lastly,  there  is  a  distinctly  prag- 
matic, or  "action,"  type  of  religious  de- 
velopment. In  this  case  the  activity  in 
which  the  religious  life  finds  its  main  ex- 
pression may  be  either,  again,  predomi- 
nantly emotion,  unreflecting  activity,  or 
an  exceedingly  unemotional  and  highly  re- 
flective type  of  activity.  Personality  is  so 
complex  that  it  is  impossible  to  get  more 
than  approximately  pure  types  of  these 
various  religious  developments.  The 
changes  in  great  personalities  are  many 
and  confusing;  the  differences  of  circum- 


110  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

stance  may  seem  to  bring  out  an  entirely 
new  side  in  the  same  religious  biography. 
The  broad-minded  pastor  becomes  a  nar- 
row-minded bishop,  or  the  thoughtful, 
tolerant  student  an  intolerant  traditional 
administrator.  At  the  same  time,  even 
underlying  such  changes,  some  emphasis  is 
almost  always  a  marked  one  in  the  great 
religious  characters  of  history.  And  any 
really  useful  study  of  religion  must  be  a 
more  or  less  objective  examination  of  its 
actual  outcome  in  human  life. 

Emotional  types  of  religious  life  have 
made  so  deep  an  impress  on  men's  minds 
that  a  superficial  student  of  historical  re- 
ligion easily  falls  into  the  mistake  of  as- 
suming that  religion  is  wholly  emotional. 
Even  Schleiermacher  was  disposed  to  call 
religion  the  feeling  of  dependence,  and  to 
minimize  the  intellectual  and  pragmatic 
elements.  This  is  false  psychology.  There 
can  be  no  emotional  reaction  without  in- 
tellectual and  pragmatic  elements;  and 
when  it  is  once  recognized  that  the  religious 
reaction  has  all  three  elements  as  necessary 
constituent  parts  it  becomes  evident  that 
it  is  a  matter  of  emphasis  and  that  emotion 


RELIGIOUS  TYPES  111 

is  far  from  being  always  the  main  emphasis 
in  the  reaction. 

However,  it  is  true  that  religion  is 
strongly  emotional  because  religion  is  the 
most  fundamental  and  powerful  impulse 
in  human  life,  not  even  the  sexual  being 
more  important,  for  it  persists  long  after 
the  sexual  impulse  has  lost  its  primary 
place,  and  it  has  been  able  to  inhibit  and 
regulate  the  sexual  life  as  no  other  impulse 
has  been  able  to  do.  Now,  all  impulses,  to 
have  power,  must  heighten  the  emotional 
life,  and  so  religion  has  concerned  itself  in 
all  ages  with  the  various  emotional  expres- 
sions. It  is  at  this  point,  indeed,  that  the 
close  and  often  confusing  relation  between 
the  sexual  and  religious  impulses  must  be 
studied.  The  suggestion  that  the  essence 
of  the  religious  impulse  is  submission,  and 
that  this  is  also  central  in  the  sexual  life 
on  one  side,  will  not  bear  examination. 
Religion  is  not  predominantly  submissive, 
and  the  central  thing  in  the  sexual  life  is 
not  submission  either. 

Religion  is  in  large  chapters  of  its  life 
almost  brutally  masculine.  Judaism,  Mo- 
hammedanism,   Brahmanism,    Puritanism, 


112  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

Confucianism  are  intensely  masculine  and 
virile  religions,  whose  very  fault  is  that 
they  fail  duly  to  minister  to  great  impera- 
tive needs  of  a  race  rising  in  refinement, 
and  so  all  have  produced  counterpoises, 
such  as  Christianity,  mystic  sects,  Bud- 
dhism, evangelicalism,  and  other  gentler 
types  of  teaching. 

The  emotional  religious  life  has  sought 
expression,  as  was  natural,  in  forms  of  art. 
It  links  itself  so  readily  and  so  completely 
with  such  expressions  that  it  is  often 
difficult,  or  even  impossible,  for  the  wor- 
shiper to  know  whether  what  moves  him 
in  the  cathedral,  in  the  music,  the  appeal 
of  words,  and  the  beauty  of  the  ritual  is 
aesthetic  sensuous  enjoyment  or  the  stirring 
of  the  religious  impulse.  Hence  there  has 
frequently  arisen  a  kind  of  jealousy  on  the 
part  of  religion  of  art,  as  in  a  sense  a  rival 
and  coclaimant  for  the  soul.  Judaism  sup- 
pressed painting  and  sculpture  and  Mo- 
hammedanism followed  the  same  desert 
impulse  in  its  emphasis  upon  a  sterner 
ritual.  Puritanism  has  carried  on  the 
same  war.  But  when  this  has  happened 
the  religious  life  has  simply  chosen  other 


RELIGIOUS  TYPES  113 

forms  of  art  such  as  poetry,  or  language,  or 
architecture,  and  thus  emotional  religion 
has  poured  out  its  longings  in  psalm  or 
music,  in  splendid  ritual  or  ornate  mosque, 
for  the  aesthetic  religious  temperament 
when  religiously  stirred  must  respond  along 
the  lines  of  its  inner  nature,  and  to  sup- 
press the  longing  completely  would  be 
simple  suicide.  It  is  equally  irrational  to 
expect  all  to  enter  into  the  highly  developed 
sesthetical  religious  expressions  with  any 
great  zeal.  Even  highly  emotional  persons 
have  often  an  extremely  primitive  sestheti- 
cal  development.  Wildly  emotional  life 
among  African  Negroes  finds  expression 
in  the  most  primitive  rhythmic  dances, 
whereas  in  some  cases  over  refinement  will 
make  it  impossible  for  some  religious  life 
to  find  any  adequate  expression  in  art  of 
its  deeper  life. 

Whatever  other  elements  there  are  in 
aesthetic  enjoyment,  one  distinguishing  fea- 
ture is  the  resolute  demand  for  the  harmony 
of  the  separate  factors  of  the  situation. 
The  materials  of  the  building,  its  lines  and 
spaces,  must  express  unity  and  harmony 
and  satisfy  us  by  their  suggesting  a  unify- 


114  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

ing  of  the  various  discords.  In  music  a 
simple  taste  is  gratified  by  a  suggestion  of 
pleasing  tones  in  some  simply  repeated 
melody.  More  highly  sophisticated  musi- 
cal tastes  must  find  the  disharmonies  built 
up  into  elaborate  unities  that  seem  dis- 
harmony to  the  simpler  mind.  It  takes 
study  and  long  careful  analysis  for  anyone 
but  a  musical  expert  to  find  the  unity  and 
harmony  of  one  of  Max  Reger's  pro- 
ductions. 

The  emotional  religious  type  demands 
harmony  and  unity  made  visible  and  real. 
It  finds  inspiration  and  comfort  and  fellow- 
ship with  God  in  the  order  and  beauty  of 
cathedral  service  or  great  painting  of  re- 
ligious devotional  import,  or  in  the  music 
of  Bach  and  Beethoven  in  their  most  re- 
ligious moods.  It  was  simply  inevitable 
that  the  evangelical  revival  should  at  last 
reach  a  class  at  first  repelled  by  its  crude- 
ness,  and  give  us  the  ritualistic  revival  of 
the  last  years  of  the  century  just  gone. 
This  ritualistic  revival  at  first  affected  only 
one  branch  of  the  Protestant  Church,  but 
it  has  now  extended  to  nearly  all,  and 
aesthetic    order    and    more    elaborate    and 


RELIGIOUS  TYPES  115 

ornate  worship  is  almost  the  note  of  the 
present  generation.  The  feelings  of  many 
who  have  no  great  sympathy  with  this 
form  of  aesthetic  expression  are  in  danger 
of  a  certain  outrage  from  the  prevalent 
tendency,  for,  after  all,  even  the  emo- 
tional type  of  religious  life  does  not  always 
by  any  means  seek  this  outward  expression 
of  its  desire  for  unity  and  harmony. 

There  is  also  what  may  be  loosely  called 
a  mystic  type  of  emotional  religion  in 
which  the  unity  sought  is  thought  of  as 
actually  one  of  substance.  We  feel  our 
life  is  torn  and  distraught,  disrupted  and 
discordant.  We  seek  in  God  a  final  unity 
and  harmony.  The  whole  emotional  sit- 
uation passionately  cries  out  for  inward 
peace.  Augustine  has  given  classical  form 
to  this  demand  of  the  soul  for  God,  and 
knowledge  that  only  in  God  does  the  soul 
find  rest.  Such  mystic  emotionalism  may 
find  expression  in  art,  but  in  classic  mys- 
ticism it  has  almost  scorned  the  outward 
and  visible  as  hindrances  to  that  intimate 
fellowship  which  it  craves  in  an  actually 
losing  of  ourselves  in  God.  Thus  in  Tauler 
and  in  German  Theology  the  mystic  com- 


116  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

munion  is  figured  as  such  identification 
and  unity  of  substance  that  only  the 
mystic  rapture  and  ecstatic  vision  of  love 
can  give  us  the  final  assurance  that  we 
need  of  eternal  rest  in  Endless  and  Un- 
speakable Divinity.  All  art  is  powerless, 
all  music  vain  in  attempting  any  expres- 
sion of  this  religious  longing  and  all- 
absorbing  faith. 

And  he  who  does  not  reckon  with  this 
faith  as  a  constantly  recurring  and  tre- 
mendously powerful  factor  in  human  so- 
ciety is  blind  to  the  forces  that  are  creating 
and  recreating  humanity.  Just  as  critical 
and  skeptical  philosophy  has  finished  its 
work  of  once  and  for  all  banishing  mys- 
ticism from  the  field  of  rationalized  life, 
up  it  crops  with  new  explosive  force  to 
defy  under  all  conditions  the  sentence  of 
death  by  its  tremendous  and  self -evidencing 
vitality. 

Those  who  are  not  mystics  must  seek  to 
understand  the  hunger  of  the  soul  which  is 
so  often  ministered  to  by  mysticism.  The 
craving  for  unity  with  God,  and  ultimate 
harmony  with  the  universe,  has  been  a 
factor  in  the  religious  life  of  all  ages,  and 


RELIGIOUS  TYPES  117 

represents  to  many  the  only  ideal  high 
enough  and  permanent  enough  to  give 
sufficient  motive  for  life  and  its  activity. 
That  it  has  at  times  sunk  into  unethical 
quietism  can  hardly  be  denied,  just  as 
aesthetic  religious  life  has  often  ended  in 
unethical  formalism,  show,  and  even  in 
irreligious  sensuousness.  At  the  same  time 
it  has,  at  times,  proved  a  most  virile  and 
unconquerable  element  in  the  lifting  man 
above  the  seen  and  the  temporal  and  giv- 
ing him  strength  and  poise  for  such  work 
as  Bernard  had  to  do,  or  Augustine  himself 
accomplished. 

Byzantine  art  has  probably  been  se- 
riously underestimated  because  so  much  of 
the  best  of  it  was  swept  away  in  the  Mo- 
hammedan flood.  There  is  so  much  in 
that  which  remains  to  us  of  real  religious 
feeling  that  we  gladly  believe  that,  with 
all  its  faults,  Byzantine  religious  life  was 
not  wholly  swallowed  up  in  the  stiff 
formalism  and  pious  phrase-making  under 
which  it  was  burdened,  and  which  it 
handed  over  as  a  woeful  heritage  to  its 
daughters,  the  Russian  Church  and  the 
churches  of  the   Orient.     It  is  from   this 


118  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

emotional  side  that,  we  believe,  Byzantine 
Christianity  can  alone  be  understood.  The 
symbols  and  creeds  that  are  repeated  so 
glibly  and  that  are  held  on  to  with  such 
fanatical  zeal  are  merely  war  banners 
made  traditionally  sacred  by  the  blood  of 
past  conflicts.  The  intellectual  interest  in 
them  seems  wholly  gone.  ^Esthetic  and 
mystic  interests  seem  to  have  been  the 
overwhelming  factors  in  the  life  of  the 
old  Greek,  or,  more  properly,  Hellenistic, 
Christianity.  These  are  the  elements  that 
entered  so  potently  into  Neoplatonic  re- 
ligious life,  and  when  a  crass  unsesthetic 
materialism  "^gains  ground  among  us  there 
arise  protests,  often  crude  enough  indeed, 
but  yet  effective  protests  in  the  life  of  New 
Thought  movements,  Theosophy,  Christian 
Science,  and  similar  appeals.  These  are 
not  to  be  met  and  conquered  by  intellectual 
analysis,  or  dismissed  with  ridicule,  scorn, 
and  laughter,  but  to  be  sympathetically 
studied  and  understood,  and  their  protest 
registered  in  our  lives  and  our  message;  for 
the  emotional  and  intuitional  temperaments 
crave  satisfaction  in  the  realization  of  their 
ideal,  and  in  some  way  this  craving  must  be 


RELIGIOUS  TYPES  119 

related  to  any  answer  we  try  to  give  to 
the    eager  questioning  of  life. 

To  a  religious  life  in  New  England  that 
had  been  intellectually  analyzed  into  tat- 
ters Phillips  Brooks  came  with  a  note  of 
emotional  and  intuitional  directness  that 
in  many  instances,  without  changing  the 
intellectual  preconceptions  in  the  least, 
changed  the  lives  of  hundreds  thirsting  for 
the  religious  life  in  forms  far  removed  from 
intellectual  analysis,  but  ministering  to  the 
parched  and  dried  places  of  the  soul's  life 
emotionally  un watered.  The  emotional  de- 
mands thus  ministered  to  were  various  in 
the  last  degree,  and  ran  the  gamut  from  de- 
sire for  ornate  service  to  mystic  satisfac- 
tion in  emotional  surrender;  but  even  many 
far  outside  the  immediate  influence  of  this 
religious  directness  felt  the  new  power  and 
significance  of  the  personality.  For  religion 
is  power,  not  logical  process. 

The  second  great  type  of  religious  per- 
sonality is  that  of  intellectual  emphasis. 
The  mind  finds  its  religious  satisfaction  in 
holding  a  great  and  satisfying  dogmatic 
system,  and  in  working  out  the  details  of 
the    system     into    authoritative    self-con- 


120  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

sistency.  Frequent  as  has  been  the  con- 
flict between  "science"  and  "dogmatic 
theology" — for  so  the  quarrel  should  be 
described  rather  than  between  "religion" 
and  science — the  resemblance  between  this 
type  of  religious  thinker  and  the  great 
speculative  scientists  is  striking  and  il- 
luminating. The  intellectual  religious  type 
seeks  fulfillment  for  his  ideal  in  a  com- 
plete and  intellectually  satisfying  system. 
Usually  he  regards  this  as  based  upon 
past  authority,  but  the  really  great  dog- 
matic theologian  has  always  rewritten  his 
system  entire;  it  is  only  the  epigonen  who 
take  over  the  system  from  another  hand. 
Augustine,  Anselm,  Thomas  Aquinas,  Cal- 
vin, among  the  older  scholastics,  and  Owen, 
Jonathan  Edwards,  and  Dorner  among  the 
more  modern  ones,  have  thus  found  rest 
for  their  religious  faith  in  great  systems 
of  thought  which  may  excite  our  merely 
aesthetic  admiration,  much  as  do  great 
cathedrals,  or  wondrous  symphonic  poems 
from  some  great  musician.  This  intel- 
lectual dogmatic  impulse  is  akin  to  the 
speculative  scientific  interest  that  presses 
for  a  self -consistent  and  therefore  satisfying 


RELIGIOUS  TYPES  121 

interpretation  of  the  world  in  terms  of  mat- 
ter or  energy  or  of  electrons. 

On  the  lower  plane  of  everyday  life, 
where  most  of  us  live,  this  type  finds  the 
deepest  religious  experience  linked  with 
a  system  of  thought,  it  may  be  Roman 
Catholic  popular  theology,  or  evangelical 
Arminianism,  or  Calvinism  subjected  to 
much  evangelical  reinterpretation;  but  the 
system  looms  up  as  the  important  thing, 
and  the  highest  religious  experience  with- 
out these  systematic  formulations  is  almost 
unthinkable.  To  such  a  mind  mysticism 
seems  shadowy  and  unreal,  and  all  aesthetic 
emotional  expression  as  vague  sentimen- 
tality. Such  a  mind  rejoices  in  positive  and 
definite  statements  of  "truth,"  and  craves 
dogmatic  and  final  sharpness  in  all  defini- 
tion. In  the  acceptance  of  a  system  from 
the  past  and  taking  religious  delight  in  it 
such  a  mind  is  hardly  aware  of  the  way  it 
recreates  the  system  for  personal  use,  and 
finds  deepest  satisfaction  in  the  way  the 
old  system  can  be  stretched  to  cover  new 
situations  utterly  unthought  of  by  the 
first  formulator.  Mohammedan  and  Con- 
fucian theology  share  with  Roman  Catholic 


122  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

scholasticism  and  Puritan  theology  the  gen- 
eral strength  and  weakness  of  this  type 
of  religious  development.  The  strength  is 
apparent  in  history.  The  men  who  have 
responded  to  the  religious  appeal  in  this 
form  swept  away  Byzantian  mysticism  and 
aesthetic  formalism,  and  covered  their 
churches  with  the  whitewash  of  the 
mosque.  They  linked  Europe  in  an  in- 
tellectual imperialism  that  at  last  defied 
Mohammedanism,  and  again  in  turn  knit 
the  souls  of  a  band  of  reformers  so  to- 
gether that  they  defied  the  forces  of 
Roman  Catholic  reaction,  and  made  Hol- 
land, Scotland,  and  Switzerland  the  bul- 
warks of  the  Reformation. 

This  intellectual  religious  type  is  not  of 
necessity  in  any  sense  truly  philosophical. 
Even  when  allied  with  some  popular  sys- 
tem of  philosophy,  the  philosophy  is  not 
the  main  organizing  interest.  For  this  in- 
tellectual type  one  goes  to  the  great  specu- 
lative religious  thinkers,  who  find  the 
expressions  for  their  religious  needs  only 
in  speculations  that  far  transcend  any  au- 
thoritative system,  and  whose  note  is  rather 
an  overwhelming  religious  curiosity  than  a 


RELIGIOUS  TYPES  123 

demand  for  intellectual  rest  in  a  system. 
Thus  Origen,  Abelard,  and  Pascal  illus- 
trate to  us  a  type  of  intellectual  religious 
development  found  in  various  shades  in 
all  vital  religions,  but  which  marks  par- 
ticularly the  restless  speculative  life  of 
India.  Such  temperaments  start  often 
from  an  assumed  authority  as  final,  but 
only  that  from  this  temporary  resting 
place  a  new  quest  may  be  made  for  still 
larger  and  deeper  truth.  Within  scholas- 
ticism this  temperament  soon  makes  itself 
felt.  Duns  Scotus  and  Zwingli  are,  perhaps, 
good  examples  of  a  type  which,  in  spite  of 
sincere  acceptance  of  a  dogmatic  system, 
really  is  interested  far  more  deeply  in  a 
speculative  system,  which,  in  the  last 
analysis,  outweighs  the  dogmatic. 

The  third  type  may  be  called  that  of 
religious  pragmatism.  Action  is  here  the 
highest  expression  of  religious  devotion.  It 
is  often  fashionable  to  sum  up  the  reli- 
gious life  in  "doing,"  but,  after  all,  doing 
never  can  be  more  than  one  outcome  of 
thinking  and  feeling.  To  love  God  and 
our  neighbor  will  result  in  appropriate  ac- 
tion, but  we  must  think  God,  and  must 


124  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

come  into  some  emotional  contact  with  our 
neighbor  before  we  can  either  love  the  one 
or  help  the  other.  At  the  same  time  on 
large  ranges  of  the  religious  life  the  actual 
expression  of  religious  idealism  is  only  to 
be  found  in  the  activity  of  the  life.  The 
activity  may  be  thrown  into  relief  by  an 
intellectual  background;  the  work  is  done 
"out  of  principle,"  or  it  may  have  an  emo- 
tional element:  "I  feel  it  is  right  to  do 
this  or  that,"  but  the  essence  is  the  doing 
of  some  work  that  has  a  religious  inspira- 
tion as  its  motive  and  purpose.  Great  as 
Luther  was  both  intellectually  and  emo- 
tionally, he  yet  is  really  of  this  active 
pragmatic  type.  He  saw  in  work  the  cen- 
ter of  religious  devotion.  He  was  before 
everything  else  a  man  of  action.  His  keen 
intellect  easily  found  reasons  for  his  ac- 
tivity, but  it  did  not  rest  upon  any  intel- 
lectual analysis.  His  emotional  life  was 
profound,  and  his  sermons  and  hymns  are 
masterpieces  of  emotional  religious  expres- 
sion, but  again  they  are  the  by-products  of 
his  unceasing  activity.  The  year  at  the 
Wartburg  was  filled  with  intellectual  work 
of   a    high    order   and   great   variety,    but 


RELIGIOUS  TYPES  125 

Luther  himself  felt  that  he  was  "an  idler'* 
(Miissiggaenger) .  He  was  lost  without  the 
active  work  of  church  organization.  His 
restless  energy  was  continually  finding  new 
channels,  and  his  practical  organizing  in- 
terest dominates  both  his  intellectual  and 
emotional  life.  Perhaps  the  same  may  be 
said  as  emphatically  of  John  Knox,  whose 
intellectual  life  was  almost  entirely  subor- 
dinated to  his  political  and  social  activity 
as  a  reorganizer,  not  only  of  the  Scottish 
Church,  but  of  Scottish  life.  To  this  type 
belongs  also  John  Wesley. 

The  more  resolutely  anyone  faces  the 
analysis  of  the  actual  religious  lives  that 
have  made  history,  the  more  evident  does 
it  become  that  religious  enthusiasm  is  of 
the  whole  nature,  and  that  it  cannot  be 
confined  even  mainly  to  any  one  channel 
of  expression.  It  has  fructified  and  strength- 
ened human  life  along  all  the  lines  of  its  in- 
telligence, its  emotions,  and  its  activities.  It 
is,  in  fact,  a  great  and  fundamental  impulse, 
to  ignore  which  is  as  unscientific  as  to  refuse 
to  examine  the  pressure  of  the  air,  or  to  try 
and  believe  that  history  can  be  explained 
without  study  of  its  ideals. 


126  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

THE  LITERATURE 

James's  "Varieties  of  Religious  Experience," 
Royce's  chapter  on  "Mysticism"  in  his  "The  World 
and  the  Individual."  But  above  all,  religious  biog- 
raphy, and  especially  autobiography — Augustine's 
"Confessions,"  Laud's  "Vindication,"  John  Wesley's 
"Journal,"  McGiffert's  "Martin  Luther,"  etc. 


CHAPTER  IX 

Ethics  and  Religion 

The  relation  of  ethics  to  religion  is  a 
subject  of  constantly  recurring  debate.  Of 
the  intimate  relationship  in  the  past  there 
can  be  no  question.  In  early  stages  of 
culture  all  conduct  was  linked  with  reli- 
gion, and  when  religions  become  obedience 
to  custom  without  ethical  content  they 
are  generally  seen  to  be  slowly  decaying. 
Science  by  its  very  nature  will  never  be 
content  to  have  religion  and  ethics  stand 
as  final  and  primitive  impulses  baffling  all 
analysis.  All  we  can  say  now  is  that  no 
satisfactory  analysis  has  yet  been  made. 
The  ethical  and  the  religious  impulses  are 
the  material  with  which  we  deal,  and  all 
attempts  so  far  to  resolve  them  into  still 
more  simple  impulses  have  proved  unsatis- 
factoiy.  The  theory  of  evolution,  with  its 
law  of  the  survival  of  that  which  proves 
useful  in  the  struggle  for  life,  seemed  at 
one  time  to  promise  much  aid,  but  it  is 
now  seen    that   it    does    not    and    cannot 

127 


128  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

deal  with  origins,  and  that  somewhere  hfe 
passes  from  an  unethical  to  an  ethical,  and 
from  a  nonreligious  to  a  religious  plane,  but 
when  or  how  we  as  yet  do  not  know.  It 
is  often  forgotten  that  modern  science  con- 
sists largely  in  describing  the  unfamiliar  in 
images  borrowed  from  the  familiar,  and 
that  this  is  justified  by  the  fact  that  in  that 
way  we  come  into  possession  of  power  to 
handle  and  master  the  unfamiliar,  but  that 
it  in  no  way  removes  the  initial  mystery. 
Somewhere  the  mind  baffled  in  its  analysis 
rests  upon  the  assumption  of  a  Law,  or  a 
Universe  or  System  of  Things,  or  an  Ab- 
solute or  an  Ultimate  Being,  or  an  Infinite. 
These  are  all  terms  that  express  simply  our 
definite  finite  limitations.  The  human 
mind  at  this  stage  of  our  development  is 
simply  not  in  a  position  to  either  set 
limits  or  discover  them  to  the  universe, 
nor  can  we  in  any  way  actually  conceive 
an  unlimited  universe.  Our  mental  analyt- 
ical machinery  breaks  down  in  attempting 
the  task.  Not  that  we  will  ever  give  it 
up;  we  will  forever  attempt  what  is  now 
for  us  impossible,  and  grow  mentally  in 
attempting  it. 


ETHICS  AND  RELIGION  129 

It  is  in  this  unexplored  and  baffling 
world  of  being  that  faith  says  to  man's 
soul  that  God  dwells.  This  unexplored 
realm  seemed  to  primitive  man  very  near 
and  relatively  comprehensible.  For  the 
modern  man  mystery  has  as  often  taken 
the  place  of  supposed  knowledge  as  actual 
knowledge  has  taken  the  place  of  sup- 
posed mystery.  Every  child  and  every 
savage  will  say  that  matter  is  quite  simple 
and  knowable.  Anything  hard  and  ex- 
tended is  "matter."  The  modern  man 
knows  that  we  know  nothing  about  any 
ultimate  "hard"  and  "extended"  matter. 
We  may  talk  for  convenience  of  "dead," 
"motionless"  matter,  but  there  is  no  dead, 
motionless  matter.  The  picture  of  our 
world  of  "hard"  and  "extended"  matter 
that  seems  at  present  best  to  answer  our 
needs  is  a  picture  of  infinitesimal  atoms 
made  up  of  corpuscles  dashing  about  at 
speeds  that  if  in  straight  lines  would  carry 
them  in  four  seconds  or  so  to  the  sun,  and 
with  a  potential  energy  that  would  rock 
the  world  were  it  exerted  without  the 
counter-balance  of  like  energy.  To  say 
that  such  a  picture  removes  mystery  or 


130  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

increases  the  simplicity  of  the  world  for 
the  ordinary  man  is  absurd.  Its  only  justi- 
fication lies  in  its  enabling  the  experimen- 
tal scientist  to  handle  better  his  systematic 
experience. 

This  universe,  or  system  of  things,  is, 
however,  constantly  pressing  down  upon 
us.  How  are  we  related  to  it?  What  does 
it  mean  for  us?  Is  it  our  friend  or  our 
enemy?  Religious  faith  has  from  the  be- 
ginning of  culture  evidently  moved  men  to 
relate  themselves  to  this  world  about  them. 
This  faith  has  with  steady  consistency 
maintained  that  God  was  as  personal  as  we 
are,  and  that  God  or  gods  governed  this 
world  beyond  us,  in  a  higher  but  analogous 
way  to  our  governance  of  our  smaller 
world.  Under  all  forms  of  faith,  from  the 
crudest  polytheism  to  the  most  spiritual 
and  refined  metaphysical  pantheism,  re- 
ligious faith  has  interpreted  that  universe 
*'beyond"  and  yet  "within"  in  images  bor- 
rowed from  our  own  most  inmost  expe- 
rience. That  our  several  interpretations  are 
final  can  no  more  be  claimed  for  them  than 
that  the  physical  theory  of  electrons  as  the 
ultimate  of  matter  can  be  hailed  as  final. 


ETHICS  AND  RELIGION  131 

The  justification  in  the  one  case  as  in  the 
other  is  the  mastery  they  have  given  us 
and  still  give  us  of  our  inward  and  deepest 
experience. 

Religion  has  not  explained  our  universe 
any  more  than  science  has,  but  it  has  co- 
ordinated it,  and  in  ever  more  satisfying 
form  enabled  us  to  conceive  of  it  as  ra- 
tional and  purposeful.  The  intellectual 
formulae  in  which  it  does  this  are  as  fleet- 
ing as  the  terminology  of  any  systematic 
and  growing  science  or  any  fashionable 
philosophy.  Even  when  names  remain  like 
*'God,"  the  "soul,"  and  "immortality,"  the 
actual  meanings  of  these  words  for  Emanuel 
Kant  are  not  those  of  the  childlike  faith 
of  a  simple-hearted  peasant.  What  is  the 
same  is  the  effectiveness  of  the  faith  in 
both  cases  to  give  strength  and  significance 
to  the  life.  And  the  reality  of  the  faith  is 
not  attested  by  the  degree  of  rationality  it 
may  attain  to,  but  by  this  effectiveness  in 
sustaining  life's  purpose;  hence  the  uni- 
versal experience  that  faith  is  known  by 
its  works  and  not  by  its  formulae.  And 
when  any  intellectual  analysis  of  faith  has 
so  distracted  us  from  its  real  content  that 


132  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

it  ceases  to  sustain  us,  we  must  become 
again  as  little  children,  not  by  acceptance 
of  now  impossible  formulations  of  faith, 
but  by  "being  born  again"  in  our  whole 
relation  to  life  in  God.  Here  again  all 
religious  teaching  is  at  one  with  human 
experience. 

From  the  beginning  of  human  experience 
man  is  born  into  close  human  relationships. 
The  great  imperatives  of  the  universe 
swayed  its  life  long  before  man  appeared. 
Now,  in  the  conscious  human  life  these 
imperatives  appear  as  categorical  demands 
upon  him,  with  the  seeming  alternative  of 
disobedience.  The  mother  should  love  her 
babe,  but  she  may  be  an  "unnatural" 
mother  and  refuse.  Cain  should  love  and 
protect  Abel,  but  he  may  be  an  unnatural 
brother  and  murder  him.  In  their  complex 
social  forms  these  imperatives  have  a 
history.  Even  the  simplest  social  moral- 
ity is  the  product  of  an  age-long  process. 
A  long  evolution  may  be  traced  in  such 
an  idea  as  "murder."  The  experiences  of 
the  man  and  the  woman  and  child  in  the 
simplest  group  life  give  more  and  more 
elaborate  meaning  to  the  great  imperative 


ETHICS  AND  RELIGION  133 

that  founded  the  family  in  the  beginning. 
Man  rises  daily  from  the  brute  to  a  divine 
companionship  with  this  eternal  mandate. 
Nor  does  he  separate  his  experiences  in  the 
family  from  his  experiences  with  the  world. 
The  complex,  invisible  world  which  he 
peoples  with  gods  and  demons  is  the  ulti- 
mate sanction  for  his  conduct  in  the  social 
group.  God  watches  over  him  and  sees 
him,  and  when  Cain  slays  his  brother  God 
tells  him  that  his  brother's  blood  crieth 
against  him  from  the  ground.  His  field  of 
ethics  is  never  really  separated  from  his 
religious  faith. 

As  time  goes  on  man  formulates  his  re- 
ligion and  his  ethics,  and  these  formula- 
tions have  frequently  very  different  origin 
and  purpose,  and  in  our  modern  world 
have  often  flown  very  far  apart;  and 
to-day  many  of  the  debates  about  the 
relation  of  religion  to  ethics  would  be 
more  fruitful  if  they  were  begun  and  car- 
ried on  as  debates  upon  the  relation  of 
religious  formulations  and  varied  systems 
of  ethics.  For  our  own  scientific  purpose 
we  must  tear  religions  and  systems  of 
ethics  apart.     We  must  often  speak  as  if 


134  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

the  imperatives  behind  them  both  were 
separable.  We  must  consider  and  weigh 
the  vaHdity  of  these  imperatives,  and  ask 
ourselves  even  such  radical  questions  as 
whether  or  no  there  is  a  place  "on  the 
other  side  and  beyond  morality,"  and 
whether  what  we  know  as  religious  ex- 
perience may  not  be  a  vast  delusion.  But 
in  the  long  run  man's  experience  is  no 
more  compartmental  than  his  psychology, 
and  sooner  or  later  ethics  and  religion  will 
both  relate  themselves  to  the  great  un- 
seen world.  Man  interprets  personally,  and 
knows  both  as  above  him  and  yet  of  his 
most  inmost  being. 

And  nowhere  has  ethics  been  more  real 
and  vital  than  when  brought  into  closest 
and  most  intimate  touch  with  the  funda- 
mental religious  enthusiasm;  and,  on  the 
other  hand,  the  modern  man  is  coming 
more  and  more  to  judge  religion,  not  so 
much  by  its  intellectual  self-consistency  or 
rational  content  as  by  its  ethical  effective- 
ness in  the  lives  of  those  who  experience 
its  power.  As  the  power  of  the  ethical 
nature  is  its  immediate  and  almost  ex- 
plosive reaction,  often  baffling  analysis,  so 


ETHICS  AND  RELIGION  135 

the  power  of  the  religious  life  is  this  same 
tremendous  compulsion  that  links  man  with 
an  unseen  purpose  far  higher  and  greater 
than  even  he  himself  can  describe.  No  one 
can  really  rationalize  the  life  of  Luther  or 
explain  its  power;  and  still  more  awed  and 
abashed  do  we  stand  before  the  religious 
mystery  of  Jesus  Christ.  And  at  these 
highest  points  we  feel  that  conduct  cannot 
be  separated  from  the  religious  impulse, 
and  that  religion's  highest  and  noblest  and 
most  self-evidencing  power  is  displayed  in 
the  realm  of  everyday  life,  and  that  he 
who  cannot  love  his  brother  whom  he  has 
seen  cannot  claim  to  love  God  whom  he 
has  not  seen. 

Moreover,  it  is  in  these  imperatives  we 
see  most  clearly  the  workings  of  the  uni- 
verse, whose  infinite  or  transcendent  life 
breaks  in  upon  our  life  of  phenomenal  ex- 
perience. Thus  God  becomes  personal  to 
us,  because  we  realize  that  the  personal 
note  is  the  highest  thing  that  gives  men 
and  women  character  and  value.  The 
imperative  "Thou  shalt"  opens  our  eyes  to 
the  fact  that  God  is  righteousness.  And 
love  as  revealed  in  the  divine  human  ex- 


136  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

perience  opens  our  eyes  to  the  fact  that 
God  is  love;  and  when,  therefore,  Jesus 
proclaims  God  as  a  loving  Father,  and  does 
so  in  wondering  reproach  that  we  did  not 
long  grasp  this  fact  before,  we  hail  it  as 
the  highest  religious  revelation  of  God;  and 
when  Jesus  lives  out  that  faith,  we  gladly 
say,  "My  Lord,  my  God,"  for  this  love  has 
become  now  a  real  human  experience,  and 
we  know  God  in  Jesus  Christ  as  loving, 
redeeming,  and  saving  the  world. 

Moreover,  our  religious  faith  finds  its 
fullest  exercise  in  its  ethics.  We  go  forth 
as  coworkers  with  God  to  transform  human 
life  into  the  image  of  God,  not  as  a  tran- 
scendental "Infinite,"  nor  yet  a  "Power  not 
ourselves  making  for  righteousness,"  nor 
the  great  "Unknown,"  but  into  the  image 
of  God  as  we  have  seen  him  in  Christ 
Jesus.  Of  course  our  vision  even  then  is 
limited  by  our  ignorance  and  ethical  in- 
competence. We  only  see  as  in  a  bronze 
mirror,  and  know  only  in  part;  but  the 
most  pressing  imperative  of  our  lives  is 
that  to  relate  ourselves  to  this  life  in  and 
above  our  world,  and  to  manifest  its  spirit- 
ual and  moral  glory,  by  sharing  in  it  and 


ETHICS  AND  RELIGION  137 

revealing  it  in  our  little  measure  as  Jesus 
has  revealed  it  in  such  satisfying  com- 
pleteness, that  we  may  be  one  with  the 
Father  as  Jesus  is  one  with  God,  and  we 
with  him. 

At  the  same  time  for  many  the  religious 
source,  as  faith  believes,  is  often  not  the 
conscious  source  of  good  men's  ethics.  The 
religious  relation  of  their  ethical  life  to 
anything  that  can  be  called  God  is  want- 
ing. This  has  many  reasons.  Sometimes 
men  have  intellectually  rejected  the  formu- 
lation of  religious  faith  so  completely  that 
the  faith  has  gone  with  the  formulation. 
This  is  often  the  fault  of  religious  teachers 
who  have  taught  men  falsely  that  to  touch 
one  iota  of  the  formulation  of  religious 
faith  was  to  destroy  the  faith.  Thus  Jesus 
and  Paul  were  rejected  as  dangerous  re- 
ligious innovators  because  they  dared  to 
question  the  accepted  religious  formula- 
tions. The  false  teachers  are  often  ac- 
cepted at  their  word,  and  when  some  part 
of  a  religious  system  is  seen  to  be  intel- 
lectually impossible  the  whole  system  is 
given  over.  Sometimes  the  religious  na- 
ture is  not  recognized  and  is  starved,  as  a 


138  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

man  may  starve  his  musical  sense,  or  his 
mathematical  genius,  or  his  social  soul. 
We  may  destroy  even  high  capacity  for 
certain  activities  by  simply  letting  them 
alone.  Sometimes  the  man  makes  a  crass 
mistake,  and  he  is,  without  knowing  it, 
serving  God  under  some  other  name,  but 
because  he  does  not  use  the  conventional 
name  thinks  he  rejects,  and  is  thought  to 
reject  God.  According  to  Jesus  at  least, 
the  moral  life  is  a  better  index  to  the 
relationship  with  God  than  professions  of 
belief,  for,  although  Jesus  demanded  also 
professions  of  faith,  what  must  always  be 
present  to  our  mind  is  the  fact  that  pro- 
fessions of  faith  may  be  lifeless  conformity 
to  group  type,  and  that  denials  may  be 
vital  attempts  to  relate  the  life  to  the 
Divine  Life  above  us. 

Both  in  science  and  in  religion,  in 
aesthetics"  and  in  ethics,  the  formulations 
are  constantly  changing,  and  timid  souls 
think  that  because  the  familiar  phrases  are 
challenged  or  are  gone,  no  science,  no  re- 
ligion, no  aesthetics,  and  no  ethics  are  left, 
whereas  in  truth  often  the  older  formula- 
tions had  served  their  day  and  now  had 


ETHICS  AND  RELIGION  1S9 

to  be  gotten  rid  of  that  the  old  truth 
might  more  clearly  be  expressed.  Thus 
John  Wesley  cleared  the  ground  for  a  new 
movement  which  his  critics  thought  was 
the  overthrow  of  all  religion  and  the  re- 
jection of  all  common  sense. 

He  is  most  free  who  feels  the  imperial 
pressure  of  a  categorical  imperative  to 
know  as  far  as  in  him  lies  his  world,  to  do 
as  far  as  in  him  lies  what  is  right  and  true, 
and  to  relate  himself  as  far  as  he  can  to 
God,  the  Spirit  of  all  truth,  as  we  see  God 
in  the  face  of  Christ  Jesus. 


THE  LITERATURE 

The  volumes  of  Hastings's  "Dictionary  of  Re- 
ligion and  Ethics"  (five  published  1912)  will  be 
found  to  contain  a  great  deal  of  material.  See 
also  Palmer's  "The  Field  of  Ethics."  Spencer's 
"Data  of  Ethics"  presents  his  view  of  the  relation- 
ship. Contrast  with  this  Paul  Carus's  "Kant  and 
Spencer."  Compare  also  Smyth's  "Christian  Eth- 
ics." The  work  of  Kant  upon  the  metaphysics  of 
religion  has  been  the  starting  point  for  nearly 
all  modern  discussions  of  this  question.  Other 
conclusions  will  perhaps  be  reached  from  those  of 
the  chapter  if  the  student  follows  Spinoza,  Schleier- 
macher,  and  Caird's  interpretation  of  Hegel. 


CHAPTER  X 

Religion  and  the  State 

The  present  attitude  of  the  state,  that 
is,  of  a  community  poHtically  organized, 
to  the  church,  or  religion  organized,  would 
have  been  quite  unthinkable  before  Locke 
and  the  rationalism  of  that  day.  Even  the 
humanists,  and  men  who,  like  Hobbes,  had 
no  dogmatic  belief,  felt  that  religion  was 
essential  to  the  very  existence  of  a  political 
state.  To-day  even  where  the  church  is 
established  by  law,  the  actual  separation 
of  the  two  forms  of  life  is  really  complete. 
And  the  assumption  is  readily  made  that 
religion  has  lost  its  significance  for  the 
political  organization.  When  the  Reforma- 
tion gave  religious  impetus  to  the  humanis- 
tic movement,  and  freed  men's  minds  from 
the  bondage  of  authority — and  it  is  note- 
worthy that  only  a  religious  movement  was 
strong  enough  to  do  this — no  one  really 
contemplated  a  separation  of  the  two 
forms    of    organization.      Luther    expected 

the  German  princes  to  enforce  true  reli- 

140 


RELIGION  AND  THE  STATE       141 

gion  and  to  guard  the  church.  Calvin 
expected  the  church  to  guard  and  really 
guide  the  state.  Hobbes  expected  the 
state  to  formulate  and  enforce  an  orthodox 
faith,  nominal  conformity  to  which  would 
give  inward  freedom. 

The  case  of  the  United  States,  with  its 
almost  complete  separation  of  church  and 
state,  was  rather  an  historical  necessity 
because  of  the  inability  of  any  one  eccle- 
siastical organization  to  represent  the  na- 
tional life  than  the  outcome  of  any  theory. 
The  New  England  states  had,  as  a  matter 
of  fact,  the  beginnings  of  a  state  church, 
and  only  the  fact  that  the  episcopacy  was 
almost  wholly  tory  in  its  sympathies  pre- 
vented it  from  claiming  state  support,  or 
it  might  readily  enough  have  become  the 
church  of  some  state,  or  even  the  nation. 
This  was  not  to  be,  and  from  now  on  it  is 
likely  that  separation  between  these  two 
types  of  organization  will  be  more  and 
more  complete. 

Why?  For  the  simple  reason  that  we 
are  seeing  daily  more  clearly  that  the 
purpose  of  an  organization  is  what  should 
determine  its  life  and  character,  and  that 


142  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

the  purpose  of  a  church  is  one  and  the 
purpose  of  any  poHtical  organization  is 
another.  A  Free  Mason's  lodge  might  con- 
ceivably take  charge  of  the  musical  in- 
terests of  a  community,  but  it  has  no 
special  fitness  for  so  doing.  An  art  acad- 
emy attracting  artistic  Masons  and  artistic 
non-Masons  will  do  their  work  much  better 
and  unhampered  by  traditions  with  a  quite 
different  history.  The  community  is  grad- 
ually realizing  that  in  organization  there  is 
elimination  of  waste,  and  much  greater 
potential  mastery  over  our  world  than  in 
unorganized  units,  and  that  the  clearer  and 
more  definite  the  aim  the  more  power 
resides  in  the  organization.  The  state  has 
nothing  mysterious  about  it.  It  is  human 
life  politically  organized  to  enable  us  to 
live  together  richly  and  in  peace.  The 
form  and  power  of  the  political  organiza- 
tion is  a  matter  of  social  expediency.  And 
all  states  have  divine  right  precisely  as  any 
college  or  academy,  any  business  corpora- 
tion or  social  club  has  divine  right.  They 
are  all  ordained  of  God  for  their  several 
purposes,  and  so  far  as  the  purpose  is  a 
legitimate  one   no   real   Protestant   should 


RELIGION  AND  THE  STATE        143 

call  any  of  them  unholy  or  unclean.  All 
forms  of  organization,  ecclesiastical,  polit- 
ical, educational,  commercial,  social,  or 
artistic,  have  their  history  in  human  life 
and  its  social  needs,  and  all  are  alike  sub- 
ject to  the  laws  of  efficiency  and  expe- 
diency. It  is  a  matter,  therefore,  of 
experience  and  social  wisdom  how  far  the 
community  organized  politically  shall  sub- 
sidize art,  education,  and  ecclesiastical 
organizations  to  promote  religion.  No 
community  has  as  yet  refused  support  to 
such  organizations.  The  churches  of  the 
United  States  receive  an  enormous  sum  in 
the  remission  of  taxes.  Some  time  this 
may  be  withdrawn,  but  at  present  even 
those  who  have  no  personal  sympathy 
with  the  aims  of  one  or  all  of  these  eccle- 
siastical organizations  still  regard  it  as 
socially  desirable,  apparently,  to  render  this 
exceedingly  great  aid;  and  so  long  as  this 
aid  is  accepted  every  church  should  feel 
itself  in  no  way  a  private  and  personal 
institution,  but  a  servant  of  the  com- 
munity which  supports  it.  It  is  under  the 
most  solemn  obligations  to  pay  its  way 
in    service,    and    to    render    any    and    all 


144  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

service  it  can  render  without  unnecessaiy 
reduplication  and  waste. 

The  poHtical  organization  of  a  modern 
state  unfits  it  in  many  ways  for  giving 
religious  and  even  moral  instruction.  Here 
the  churches  should  render  all  the  service 
they  can,  and  become  the  organization 
through  which  the  community  expresses 
its  will  to  religiously  educate.  Sometimes 
the  community  has  not  even  undertaken 
to  supply  by  its  political  organization 
machinery  and  support  for  other  forms  of 
education,  and  until  it  does  the  church, 
although  in  some  ways  not  well  adapted  to 
do  this  work  in  the  best  way,  may  well 
enter  the  field  to  render  this  service,  in 
God's  name,  to  the  community.  Again, 
what  will  be  the  form  of  the  service  cannot 
be  settled  a  priori.  Only  large  and  critically 
considered  social  experience  can  give  us  an 
answer.  Already  the  churches  are  com- 
mitting to  other  organizations,  such  as  the 
Young  Men's  Christian  Association  and  so- 
cial settlements,  work  they  cannot  do  as 
well  as  special  organizations  for  these 
specific  purposes  can  do  them.  These  are 
as  much  divine  institutions  for  their  spe- 


RELIGION  AND  THE  STATE        145 

cial  form  of  service  as  churches  are  for 
theirs.  We  do  not  exalt  the  ecclesiastical 
organization  by  refusing  providential  char- 
acter to  other  organizations.  For  the 
Christian  Protestant  all  life  is  sacred,  and 
there  are  no  secular  affairs. 

What,  therefore,  separates  the  religious 
forms  of  the  past  from  our  own  day  is  not 
the  fact  that  the  age  is  less  religious — it  is 
probably  more  religious — but  the  new  out- 
look upon  life,  and  the  more  or  less  clear- 
eyed  recognition  of  the  fact  that  God 
works  in  human  forms,  and  expresses  his 
life  in  the  limited  life  of  his  children,  and 
that  these  expressions  are  marked  at  every 
point  by  our  ignorance  and  limitations. 
We  have  no  ideal  church  government  given 
to  us  from  heaven  with  divine  authority. 
We  have  authority  given  us  from  heaven 
to  fit  our  organizations  from  generation  to 
generation  to  the  varied  needs  of  men. 
The  authority,  therefore,  of  any  organiza- 
tion is  limited  by  its  underlying  purpose. 
The  church  has  high  authority  for  render- 
ing its  peculiar  service;  it  has  no  especial 
authority  to  dictate  the  forms  of  political 
organization  or  to  limit  the  legitimate  ac- 


146  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

tivities  of  other  organizations  equally  called 
with  her  to  render  their  peculiar  forms  of 
service.  Absolute  and  sharp  delimitation  is 
as  impossible  here  as  elsewhere.  Human 
life  is  one,  and  the  universe  is  one.  To-day- 
organic  and  inorganic  chemistry  are  terms 
of  convenience — the  sharp  distinction  has 
been  swept  away.  The  complexity  of 
human  purpose  is  very  great.  The  larger 
purpose  often  includes  the  smaller.  At 
times  there  seem  inevitable  conflicts  be- 
tween men's  purposes,  but  at  heart  we  all 
believe  that  a  splendid  and  thoroughgoing 
unity  binds  together  all  our  complex 
aims,  and  that  in  the  fulfillment  of  our 
highest  purpose  alone  does  life  gain  its 
deepest  significance. 

The  religious  man  sees  in  his  religion  the 
relation  of  all  his  aims  and  hopes,  ambi- 
tions and  purposes  to  God's  plan.  He 
feels  so  personally  linked  with  God  that 
he  knows  something  of  that  plan,  and  finds 
in  the  working  out  of  God's  plan  for  him- 
self and  the  world  about  him  his  highest 
joy  and  largest  and  most  permanent  sat- 
isfaction. 

In   another  respect  the  whole  attitude 


RELIGION  AND  THE  STATE       147 

toward  what  is  rather  unfortunately  called 
"religious  toleration"  has  changed.  At  one 
time  the  unity  of  the  group  was  not  only 
the  most  important  element  in  its  strength, 
but  the  religious  organization  was  the  most 
effective  bond  to  secure  that  unity.  To 
break  that  unity  was  to  menace  the  group 
soUdarity,  and  even  to-day  group  solidar- 
ity is  realized  as  vastly  important.  The 
fiercest  and  most  tragic  war  of  recent 
times  was  waged  to  secure  group  solidarity. 
But  no  longer  does  any  religious  organiza- 
tion represent  this  effective  bond.  This  is 
often  a  cause  of  surely  somewhat  thought- 
less lamentation.  The  bond  that  now 
holds  groups  together  is  that  complex  and 
undefinable  thing  we  call  group  or  national 
culture.  It  has,  indeed,  many  elements, 
but  no  one  of  these  elements  can  be  called 
supreme.  It  is  not  language;  Switzerland 
has  three  official  tongues.  It  is  not  race; 
there  are  no  satisfactory  definitions  of  race. 
It  is  not  law;  the  Roman  and  English  em- 
pires have  shown  that  various  systems  of 
law  may  be  worked  together.  It  is  not  any 
geographical  term;  for  here  again  the 
strongest  empires  have  defied  geography. 


148  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

Yet  culture  has  all  these  elements,  and 
among  the  most  important  is  the  religious 
life.  It  is  not  religious  dogmas;  these  may 
be  common  property  of  many  cultures,  as 
in  Persia,  Egypt,  and  Turkey,  without  giv- 
ing final  shape  to  any.  It  is  not  religious 
cult  or  rite,  but  religious  ideals.  These 
may  not  be  widely  spread,  or  even  every- 
where effective,  any  more  than  national 
painting  or  national  music  is  within  the 
scope  of  all.  But  these  ideals  lend  tone 
and  color  to  any  national  group,  and  it 
is  impossible  to  understand  Italy,  France, 
China,  Japan,  or  Russia  without  some 
knowledge  of  the  religious  ideals  which 
give  color  and  character  to  the  whole 
national  group  life.  What  we  call  tolerance 
is  the  gradual  recognition  of  the  varied 
complexity  in  the  group  life,  and  the  grow- 
ing experience  of  the  far  greater  strength 
and  purity  of  the  higher  elements  of  cul- 
ture when  they  have  liberty  to  work  and 
express  themselves  unhampered  by  the 
lower  motive  of  external  group  unity;  and, 
in  point  of  fact,  this  is  daily  being  seen 
more  clearly,  and  men  are  coming  to  realize 
that  the  strongest  group  bond  is  not  an 


RELIGION  AND  THE  STATE        14.9 

external  conformity  to  group  type,  but  an 
inner  kinship  with  an  expanding  cultural 
ideal. 

Tolerance  has  still  the  air  of  a  claim  to 
absolute  knowledge,  which,  however,  "tol- 
erates" error,  while,  in  fact,  the  modern 
world  is  both  farther  away  from  any  claim 
to  absolute  knowledge  than  any  previous 
world  of  thought,  and  also  more  resolutely 
bent  upon  getting  rid  of  error,  and  more 
intolerant  of  it.  Again,  it  is  our  sense  of 
the  relative  character  of  all  our  formula- 
tions that  is  making  us  more  and  more 
willing  to  learn  all  we  can  from  any  man 
of  good  will  who  seems  perhaps  to  question 
our  favorite  formulations,  but  who  also 
claims  to  have  something  worth  our  while 
to  listen  to.  Thus  in  the  political  world 
we  listen  to  men  whose  proposals  contem- 
plate an  entire  reconstruction  of  our  social 
order.  We  listen  with  doubt  and  a  whole- 
some skepticism,  but  we  listen.  Once  this 
was  seemingly  quite  incompatible  with  any 
group  solidarity;  to-day  we  realize  that 
freedom  to  hear  and  speak  has  strength- 
ened group  solidarity.  So  also  in  the 
religious  realm.     We  listen  to  Mohammed 


160  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

and  Buddha,  not  because  we  think  them 
right,  but  because  we  realize  that  to  under- 
stand them  is  our  only  way  of  meeting  any 
error  they  proclaim  or  getting  any  truth 
they  may  present.  Nor  have  our  experi- 
ments in  this  catholicity  worked  badly.  It 
has  led,  indeed,  to  much  reformulation  of 
religious  statement,  but  it  has  allayed 
some  of  the  bitterest  and  most  effective 
opposition  that  religion  has  had  to  en- 
counter. To  the  faithful  historian  it  has 
long  been  known  that  there  never  was  an 
"age  of  faith,"  and  that  the  seeming  unity 
of  religious  organization  on  the  basis  of 
phrases  and  formulse  never  really  repre- 
sented any  vital  unity,  either  intellectual 
or  moral  or  religious.  What  could  be  the 
value  of  a  religious  unity  with  Leo  X  as  its 
visible  head?  What  could  be  the  value  of 
a  religious  unity  that  was  dominated  by 
Constantine  or  Henry  the  Eighth.^  Reli- 
gion as  the  highest  in  the  scale  of  the 
imponderable  higher  values  rests  upon  in- 
timate personal  complex  experiences,  of 
which  only  the  religious  man  can  bear  his 
testimony,  and  whose  objective  value  can 
be  measured  only  by  the  correspondence  of 


,  RELIGION  AND  THE  STATE       151 

his  experiences  with  those  of  other  men,  and 
by  the  fruitfulness  of  his  experience  and  in- 
terpretation of  it  in  the  ways  of  Hfe.  When 
Paul  and  Luther  and  Wesley  claim  to  have 
personal  transforming  experiences  the  world 
calls  them  insane.  But  others  recognize 
the  same  elements  in  a  smaller  way  in 
their  own  lives  and  accept  their  testimony, 
and  see  the  fruitfulness  of  these  experiences 
in  strength  for  life,  and  in  purification  of 
conduct,  and  in  new  and  vital  relationships 
to  the  Unseen.  It  is  open  to  anyone  not 
having  had  any  religious  experience  to  deny 
its  reality,  as  anyone  never  having  had  a 
musical  rapture  thinks  coldly  and  con- 
temptuously of  the  enthusiastic  musician. 
And  the  religious  man  can  do  little  but  live 
the  religious  life  and  proclaim  as  well  as 
he  may  the  source  of  its  vitality.  Hence 
we  are  willing  to  welcome  in  the  name  of 
religion  anyone  who  seems  to  have  had, 
even  in  strange  dress  and  using  unfamiliar 
formulae,  a  real  religious  insight,  and  who 
claims  to  have  found  in  the  phase  of  truth 
he  presents  strength  and  grace  for  life  and 
death. 

The    degeneracy    of    this    attitude    may 


152  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

often  be  represented  by  a  harmful  and 
destructive  indifference.  Much  boasted 
"tolerance"  is  simply  mental  inertia  and 
moral  indolence.  The  remedy  is,  however, 
not  a  return  to  narrow  insistence  upon  any 
formulae,  but  a  broad  and  strong  emphasis 
upon  the  need  of  truth  and  the  fatal  char- 
acter of  all  indolently  harbored  untruth. 
Never  was  it  more  important  for  the  life  and 
soul  of  any  of  us  that  we  should  have  clear 
and  definite  views  of  religious  truth.  We 
may  not  profess  to  cover  the  whole  wide 
universe  in  the  sweep  and  scope  of  our 
confession  of  faith.  But  it  should  be 
sharply  and  clearly  our  own  confession  of 
faith  and  personal  hope.  It  will  be  a 
growing  confession  of  faith  as  our  reli- 
gious experience  widens  and  quickens,  and 
as  our  own  intellectual  life  changes  and 
deepens.  It  will  be  humbly  held,  because 
we  are  so  easily  misled,  and  it  will  try  to 
include  the  values  in  life  that  we  have 
found  our  own  need  of  in  actual  struggle 
toward  higher  things. 

Yet  this  personal  and  ever  more  or  less 
private  formulation  of  our  faith  from  time 
to  time  has  a  quite  different  meaning  from 


RELIGION  AND  THE  STATE       153 

equally  important  social  confessions  of 
faith.  These  can  never  be  more  than  a 
compromise.  Two  persons  who  think  they 
really  believe  the  same  words  are  either 
simply  ignorant  of  the  limitation  of  human 
speech,  or  have  repeated  formulae  they  have 
not  weighed  and  made  their  own.  All 
definitions  are  delimitations  for  special  pur- 
pose, and  can  have  value  only  when  we 
know  the  purpose.  For  practical  purposes 
we  use  words  with  general  but  indefinite 
agreement  as  to  their  significance.  Social 
creeds  are  general  expressions  of  agree- 
ment. The  more  exactly  and  scientifically 
they  are  expressed  the  more  disagreement 
will  they  evoke.  With  increasing  intelli- 
gence and  developed  personality  it  is 
becoming  increasingly  impossible  to  find 
any  set  of  words  intelligent  men  will 
accept  without  the  right  to  use  the  words 
in  their  own  sense.  The  social  creed  is  a 
broad  platform  expressing  the  general  pur- 
pose of  the  creedal  body,  and  the  limits  of 
disagreement  are  always  various.  The  per- 
sonal element,  with  its  sense  of  the  need  of 
clear  understanding  of  individual  position  on 
the  one  hand,  and  the  sense  of  unity  of  aim 


154.  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

underlying  all  differences  on  the  other, 
makes  it  a  delicate  question  what  are  the 
limits  of  cooperation. 

One  serious  difficulty  is  that  the  answer 
to  the  question,  "Have  I  a  right  within  an 
organization?"  has  been  too  much  placed 
on  a  legal  basis,  and  where  there  is  doubt 
it  has  been  fought  out  upon  merely  techni- 
cal and  legal  grounds.  The  answer  should  be 
a  social  answer,  but  should  be  given  on  the 
broadest  lines  of  social  expediency.  It 
would  be  death  to  any  organization  to 
refuse  to  tolerate  any  variations  in  opinion. 
The  holding  of  a  creedal  position  intel- 
lectually may  leave  one  quite  disloyal  to 
the  real  purpose  of  the  creedal  organiza- 
tion, whereas  wide  difference  of  intellec- 
tual judgments  may  give  vitality  and 
adaptive  power  to  the  society.  The  broad 
lines  of  usefulness  within  the  organization 
for  the  advancement  of  its  main  end  are 
the  only  safe  ones  for  determination  of 
any  member's  rights  within  the  organiza- 
tion. Even  on  these  lines  mistakes  would 
be  made,  but  probably  far  less  often  than 
under  past  and  existing  conditions. 

There  would  thus  be  a  constant  demand 


RELIGION  AND  THE  STATE       155 

for  reexamination  and  revision  of  all  plat- 
forms, and  intellectual  inertia  would  be 
disturbed  and  made  anxious.  The  fantas- 
tic notion  that  we  can  stand  still  and 
cease  to  grow  without  dying  is  still  wide- 
spread. It  is  troublesome  to  reclothe  anew 
from  time  to  time  our  faith  in  new 
formulae,  but  just  as  we  have  to  daily  feed 
and  reclothe  our  bodies,  so  from  time  to 
time  we  must  feed  and  reclothe  our  faith, 
and  a  strong,  healthy  faith  needs  constant 
exercise  and  constant  reclothing. 


Thus  faith  interpenetrates  all  life.  Its 
meaning  for  life  is  all-important  and  all- 
embracing.  Those  who  turn  away  from 
the  subject  in  ignorant  indifference  know 
no  real  history  and  miss  the  clue  to  man's 
deepest  psychology,  and  the  key  to  the 
mystery  of  life  and  death.  That  faith  will 
ever  die  is  unthinkable.  The  courage  and 
poise  real  faith  gives  to  the  human  life  will 
make  it  triumphant  amid  all  seeming  de- 
feats, and  as  in  the  past  so  always  when 
men  most  scornfully  nail  it  to  a  cross, 
its  resurrection  is  assured  in  still  greater 
power    to    reorganize    and    quicken    again 


156  RELIGION  AND  LIFE 

human  life  for  divinest  mission;  the  revela- 
tion of  God  incarnate  in  a  human  life  fit  to 
be  called  the  temple  of  the  living  God; 
human  lives  reorganized  as  the  sons  and 
daughters  of  the  Most  High. 


THE  LITERATURE 

The  relation  of  the  church  to  the  state  has  a 
whole  library  to  itself,  and  yet  an  adequate  treat- 
ment from  the  modern  point  of  view  is  lacking. 
Dunning  discusses  the  matter  briefly  in  his  "Poht- 
ical  Theories,"  Volume  II;  especially  see  pages  365, 
366.  Geffcken's  work  is  translated  from  the  German 
under  the  title  "Church  and  State"  (1877).  A 
short  article  in  the  Encyclopaedia  Britannica  (XI)  on 
Establishment  is  an  excellent  sketch  of  the  his- 
tory, but  the  bibliography  is  meager. 


INDEX 


Ab^lard,  123 

Abraham,  95 

Absolute,  the,  128 

Ages,  Middle,  89 

Agnosticism,  104 

American,  citizenship,  99 

Amphyctionic  Council,  31 

Anabolism,  51 

Ancestor  worship,  27 

Animism,  28,  72 

Ansehn,  120 

Aquinas,  Thomas,  12 

Arabic  scholarship,  87 

Architecture,  37 

Aristocracy,  military,  86 

Ai-minianism,  121 

Art,  37 

Assisi,  Francis  of,  61 

Astarte,  35,  46 

Astronomy,    astrology     and, 

35 
Augustine,  115 
Autosuggestion,  57 


Baal,  priests  of,  57 
Babylon,  43,  85 
Bach,  114 
Balkan  states,  4 
Beckmesser,  59 
Beethoven,  77 
Bichloride  of  mercury,  19 


Blood,  relationship,  96 
Brahmanism,  111 
Brooks,  Phillips,  119 
Browning,  Robert,  100 
Buddha,  62 
Buddhism,  2,  92 
Buddhism,  rise  of,  9 
Byzantine  art,  117 


Cain,  story  of,  95 
Calvin,  64 
Caste,  priestly,  40 
Cathedral,  112 
Certainty,  mathematical,  13 
Chant,  Gregorian,  37 
Character,    social    and    per- 
sonal, 24 
China,  102 
Christianity,  9,  86 
Christianity,  Byzantine,  118 
Christianity,  China,  43 
Church,  Roman,  10 
Church  and  state,  97 
Cicero,  time  of,  9 
Clerics,  48 
Comte,  28 

Conduct,  rehgion  and,  101 
Confederacy,  Indian,  31 
Conformity,  52 
Confucius,  58,  92 
Cosmogony,  science  and,  37 


157  • 


158 


INDEX 


Creeds,  153 
Crusades,  92,  100 
Cycles,    vegetative    and    as- 
tronomical, 35 
Cynicism,  10 


Damascus,  64 
Dance,  37 
Darwin,  36 
Death,  28 

Definitions,  value  of,  1 
Delphic,  31 
Democracies,  85 
Democracy,  23 
Democracy,  English,  11 
Democracy,  superstition  and, 

6 
Despotism,  23 
Determinism,  67 
Dorner,  120 
Dreams,  27 


Ecclesiasticism,  49,  97 
Education,  Jewish,  47 
Education,  primitive,  47 
Edwards,  Jonathan,  120 
Egypt,  43,  74 
Emotions,   religion  and,   22, 

111 
Empire,  Roman,  86 
Energy,  life  as,  69 
Epicureanism,  10 
Epistomology,  12 
Ethics,  religion  and,  24,  127 
Etiquette,  49,  50 
Evolution,  68,  105,  127 


Experiences,  religious,  22 
Experimentation,  14 


Fact,  material,  75,  83 
Faith,  life  and,  155 
Faith,  reason  and,  21 
Fear,  rehgion  and.  46 
Fire,  tribal,  33 
Frazer,  33,  38 
Free  will,  67 


Genius,  insanity  and,  60 
Genius,  quality  of,  79 
Gnosticism,  10 
God,  notion  of,  27 
Gravitation,  19 
Greek  art,  44 
Guilds,  Middle  Age,  87 


Hellenism,  86 

Hehnholz,  36 

Hesiod,  36 

Hinduism,  81 

Hobbes,  Thomas,  140,  141 

Homer,  36 

Hydrogen,  15 

Hymns,  Vedic,  36 


Idealism,  creative,  70,  71 
Idealism,  rehgion  and,  71 
Idealism,  transcendental,  10 
Imperative,  categorical,  90 
Imperatives,  ethical,  132 
Inhibitions,  children  and,  50 


INDEX 


159 


Inspiration,  78 
Instinct,  the  artistic,  75 
Interest,    priestly    and    pro- 
phetic, 40 
Ion,  17 
Isaac,  95 
Israel,  74 


Jacob,  83 

Jehovah,  74 

Jesus,  58,  77,  136,  137 

Joy,  religion  and,  47 

Judaism,  42,  92,  111 


Kant,  72,  131 
Katabolism,  51 
Knox,  John,  125 


Laboratory,  21 

Leibnitz,  12 

Levitical,    the  development, 

52 
Lincoln,  strength  of,  8 
Locke,  John,  140 
Luther,  62,  124,  135,  140 
Lutheran  Church,  98 


Machinery,  magic  and,  6 

Magic,  29 

Mana,  29 

Materialism,  10 

Mathematics,  13 

Matter,  129 

Method,  experimental,  16 


Mexico,  88 
Missions,  foreign,  103 
Modernism,  98 
Mohammedanism,  4,  47 
Mosque,  113 
Mutiny,  Indian,  4 
Mysterious  and  religion,  27 
Mysticism,  116 
Mysticism,  Byzantine,  122 
Myths  and  their  meaning,  33 


Napoleon  I,  18 
Nations,  seven,  31 
Negroes,  African,  113 
Neoplatonic  religion,  the,  118 
Nietzsche,  61 
Northwest,  winning  of,  89 


Olympic  feasts,  31 
Organization,   rights   within, 

31 
Origen,  123 
Owen,  120 
Oxygen,  15 


Paganism,  84 
Pantheism,  130 
Pantheon,  31,  35 
Parkman,  89 
Parsifal,  23 
Pascal,  123 
Paul,  137,  151 
Personal,  God,  130 
Personality,  70,  109 
Perugino,  70 


IGO 


INDEX 


Phoenicians,  35 

Plate,  photographic,  20 

Plato,  72 

Polynesian  words,  29 

Polytheism,  32 

Poseidon,  35 

Priest,  39 

Priest,  ethics  of  the,  53 

Primitive  man,  28 

Progress,  106 

Prophet,  Jewish,  76 

Prophetic,  the,  interest,  56 

Psychology,  110 

Psychology,  religious,  23 

Puritanism,  112 


Quackery,  80 
Quietism,  117 


Raphael,  70 
Rationalism,  104 
Reason,  faith  and,  21 
Reformation,  61,  96,  98,  140 
Reger,  Max,  114 
Religion,  aesthetic,  113 
Religion,  definition  of,  2 
Religion,  function  of,  25 
Rehgion,       importance       of 

study,  3 
Religion,  primitive,  30 
Rehgion,  types  of,  108 
Revival,  evangelical,  114 
Revival,  ritualistic,  114 
Rh3rthm,     group     and    per- 
sonal, 44 
Russian,  the,  church,  117 


Sabbath,  45 

Savages,  29 

Savonarola,  64,  80 

Schleiermacher,  73,  110 

Scholasticism,  12 

Science,  Christian,  90,  118 

Scotus,  Duns,  123 

Seasons,  cycle  of,  34 

Selfishness,  class,  75 

Sepoys,  4 

Sexual,  rehgion  and  the.  111 

Shakespeare,  78 

Smith,  W.  Robertson,  29 

Socialist  party,  6 

Socrates,  58 

Solidarity,    the    group,    147, 

149 
Soul,  its  aspects,  108 
Spencer,  Herbert,  27 
Spinoza,  12 
Stoicism,  10 
Superstition,  7 
Swedenborg,  61 
Synagogue,  47 


Tables,  law  of,  96 
Taboo,  29,  50,  94 
Talmud,  43 

Taste,  appeal  to,  20,  68 
Tauler,  115 

Taxes,  remission  of,  143 
Theology,  German,  115 
Theosophy,  118 
Thirty  Yeais'  War,  92 
Toleration,  147,  149 
Totemism,  73 
Traditionalism,  84 


INDEX 


161 


Transfiguration,    Mount    of,     Wagner,  23,  70 


63 
Tree,  worship  of,  32 
Truth,  standai'd  of,  30 
Turkey,  148 
Tylor,  28 

Uniformity,  faith  in,  19 
University,       Mohammedan, 
47 


Wartburg,  124 

Water,  illustration  from,  15 

Weapons,  83,  139 

Wesley,  64,  125 

Women  and  rehgion,  7 

World,  Oriental,  102 


Young  Men's  Christian  As- 
sociations, 144 


Values,  rehgious,  23 

Vu-gil,  9 

Vision,  creative,  80 


Zeal,  religious,  92 
Zwingli,  123 


Date 

Due 

i 

(I) 

1    1012  01004   1459 


